Jericho 2008

Thankfully the beginning of the day was not a precursor of the activities to come. I'd planned to be up at 3:50 am, potty and feed the boys, shower, make coffee and have a light breakfast before leaving at 4:30 am to pick up Lise and meet our carpool at 5:00 am. Well, Lise called me at 5:00 and woke me up!!! Oh Shit! Hopped out of bed, dressed and was dragging the dogs out to potty as I was calling Troy, the carpool driver. My saving grace was the idjit who left his car and boat blocking the trailer egress down at SSP. I was out of the house, dogs feed and pottied, in 15 minutes! Got Lise and made it to SSP another 20 minutes after that. And the guys had just cleared the path for the trailer. We had 5 people in a Ford F150 crew cab. Troy and Patrick in the front seat, Lise, me, and Frank in the backseat. I took the hump seat as penance for my tardiness. We were on our way.

We stopped in Bellingham around 7:00 for gas, coffee, and pit stop and connected with Tom and Lianne, their son Kyle and dog Gibson. Then we caravaned to the border, a quick hello to the border guard and off to Vancouver. We arrived at Jericho beach around 9, unloaded the boats and set to rigging them. Jericho is on English Bay which opens into Howe Sound and the water has the potential for big waves, certainly bigger than we see in Lake Washington, so we needed to put on the spray skirts. They are similar to kayak spray skirts only bigger and a real pain to put on. And I needed to locate our steersperson. Kristen was unavailable for so she lined up Miranda McNamara from Jericho as her replacement.

The boats were ready and everyone was there so we got the boat down to the water. Our crew was Lianne in stroke (her first race ever), Rives, Nancy, Melissa, Lise, and Miranda steering. We headed out for a little warm-up and then set up for the start. And we're off! We started towards False Creek, around an inflatable bouy and then back towards Howe Sound. It was a very exciting turn, there were many boats clustering together for the turn and Miranda took a very aggressive line. At the turn there were two boats slightly ahead of us bumping each other a bit, our bow was just a little between them. We nudged the tail of the boat closest to the bouy and they spun out away from the bouy and in the process hit the boat they were next to and both boats went off totally away from the bouy and we were left with a nice clean turn! Wow, talk about an adrenaline push right at the start. You could hear those crews yelling at one another for a long time afterwards. Then it was a long push to the red bell can bouy, it felt like forever until we finally got there. We had clear water and as we were coming around Miranda cut us a bit close and then called Lianne and Rives to draw, that helps bring the nose of the boat around more quickly. We the wind was a bit stronger than she realized and we were closer to the bouy than expected and then there was that sickening, stomach clentching sound as the ama scraped/crunched along the bouy. Well, nothing we can do about it now, we have to get back in, time to dig deep and get us home.

We paddled hard until we heard the finish horn, done! It was a long, hard race, but we finished. We were 11th across the line and the 3rd master women's crew. Back on the beach we were able to take a look at the ama, it was split at the seam, about 5 inches long, and you can see a bit of the foam inside, there was also a bit of cracking on the top, too. It will take a bit of repair to make it watertight again, but the damage is all above the water line. In all we got off easy, one of the boats from Mt Home, a club down from Portland, had their ama damaged so badly at the start of the men's race they were taking on water during their race. Our men's A team (Doug, Clem, Than, Ed, Ryan, and Tom) were 4th across the line and took 3rd in open men's, our men's B team (Frank, Ernie, Patrick, Ken, Todd, and Troy) were the last men's crew to finish and were 10th in open men's. It was a good day racing in all.

Jericho has a yummy BBQ after the race. After the prizes were passed out we gathered our carpool and hit the road again. It took a while to get back to SSP and drop of the trailer and put the gear back into the container. I was off to drop Lise home a bit past 8 pm and home around 8:30 pm or so. A very long day, a very good day. Way to go SSPO!