My travels went quite smoothly and I arrived in Cape Town around 7 o'clock local time Friday evening. The Mocke brothers dispatched Mr. Aldo Cicatello to drive me from the airport to the beach community of Fish Hoek. Fish Hoek sits on the False Bay side of the Cape Peninsula, and while it was once its own municipality, it is now part of the City of Cape Town.
I'm staying at the same bed & breakfast (they call them "guest houses" in South Africa) where I stayed on my previous two visits to South Africa: the Tuscan Villa in Fish Hoek. I wouldn't say it's super-fancy, but it's a real B&B, not one of those "Air" B&Bs. The place makes a low-maintenance guy like me feel like he's in the lap of luxury, most notably at breakfast time, when they serve a complete home-cooked meal. The proprietor, a lady named Anita, is as conscientious a host as you'll ever find, and she's a fount of knowledge of this area and can offer advice to her guests on just about any topic. Here in the "high season" (December through March) the rate runs around R1700 per person; at the current rate of about 16.1 South African Rand to the U.S. dollar, that comes to about $105.60. That's a bit higher than I usually pay at the budget motels (Days Inn, Baymont Inn, Econo Lodge, etc.) that I typically stay at in my own country, but you get a lot for the money. And within the last several years the exchange rate has been as high as 20 Rand to the dollar, making Tuscan Villa an even better deal for the U.S. visitor. I certainly want to believe that the dollar will be that strong again sooner or later, but, well... don't get me started on the state of such things in my nation.
I spent yesterday enjoying some unstructured time before the beginning of camp. I walked to the Fish Hoek Beach Sports Club, where I caught up with a couple of friends and inspected the new construction that has occurred since my last visit four years ago. I did some grocery shopping and other errands, and otherwise just worked on getting over my jet lag.
Camp began this morning, and it was different from what I'd expected. Normally the first morning sees campers get their boats adjusted before doing an easy paddle, but there was a strong enough southeast wind blowing to create serviceable conditions out on the Miller's Run, and with very little wind in the forecast for the next couple of days, the Mocke brothers decided to get us on out there for a pair of downwind runs while we had the chance.
I worked hard back home to be ready for this camp, but I don't think anything I could have done in advance would have spared me the shock to the system I got today. I laid down one hard sprint after another to get what I could from the moderate-sized conditions, and halfway through the first run I was exhausted. Dawid Mocke told me to stop working so hard and spend the rest of that run letting the runs come to me, and that was what I needed to hear at that moment. I paddled on in to Fish Hoek Beach catching some good runs here and there but not trying to conquer the world. I carried that approach into the second run, which we did after a short break at the Fish Hoek Beach Sports Club.
While driving back to Miller's Point for the second run, Dawid's brother Jasper went over a couple of things I could be doing better. There were probably many things I could have been doing better, but Jasper focused on just a couple, and that was wise, because it prompted me to spend the second run working on just those couple of things and not overloading my senses any more than they already were.
Regardless, I was absolutely gassed by the time I was coming in to the beach for the second time. My arms and shoulders were stiff and sore from the lactic acid generated by the not-so-efficient paddling I had done. I'm probably still a little jet-lagged and that was a contributing factor, but the truth is that ocean downwind paddling is more intense and just plain different from anything I can do in Memphis, Tennessee. Right now I'm hoping that my fitness base is solid enough to enable my body to adapt to these new stresses as the week moves along.
I'll write more later, and I hope I'll be able to articulate my insights more lucidly. But for now what I need is to go to bed and sleep soundly.
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