We've had perhaps a little bit of a break in the weather this weekend. It's still plenty hot, but the intensity of the heat hasn't been quite as terrible as it was during the last week. The forecast contains some hope for more relief by the end of this coming week.
Yesterday I paddled the surfski from the dock to the mouth of the harbor, and found no barge traffic out on the Mississippi. So I returned to the dock and got in the whitewater boat. I did forward stroke drills, backstroke drills, spin drills, Eskimo rolls... all kinds of stuff. Then I put my boats away and washed up under the hose. In the summertime, the moment when I've finished paddling and taken a cool hose bath is often the best I feel all day.
This morning I paddled the ski back to the harbor's mouth, and found an upstream-moving barge rig positioned so that I would have to gain on it a little to have any hope of surfing its best waves. I paddled up along the Tennessee bank until I reached the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, and then ferried over to the far half of the river that the towboat was navigating. By the time I got over there I had missed out on the best waves, and I was tired from all the hard paddling I'd done just to get to that point. Actually, I think I might have been feeling tired even before I got in the boat. Some days that's just how it is.
In other news, out on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon the Dragon Bravo fire seems to be raging. It sounds like the weather this past week could not have been worse for fighting a fire. The fire's acreage has quadrupled over the last week. My launch date is four weeks from Wednesday... two weeks ago I was hoping six weeks would be enough time for the fire to get under control; a week ago I was hoping five weeks would be enough; and now I'm hoping four weeks will be enough.
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