Before the weekend came we got the weather
forecast… it was calling for wind.
Sunday looked a little better so we decided that would be our paddle
day… An e-mail went out to the usual
folks… meet at 9 am at St. Philips...
Only Tony and I showed up. It was
-9 deg Celsius when I pulled in, more with the wind chill. But we've paddled in colder temperatures.
The slipway was full of ice pans when we arrived...
That bigger one looked like it could give us a little trouble...
but we managed to slip between it and the side of the wharf as it as it
ebbed with the water…
I started heading out through the channel as
Tony was putting on his spray-skirt. I
heard him saying his skirt was frozen as I paddled out. After a minute or two there was no sign of
him in the cove so I figured the skirt must have given him trouble. So I paddled back in and it took the both of us
to get the skirt over the coaming. We laughed,
thinking it was funny… how many paddlers does it take to put on a spray skirt
on a chilly Sunday morning? Whose idea
was it to paddle this morning anyway…
We finally got down to paddling business and headed
for Portugal Cove, playing in the clapitus along the way…
We hung around in Portugal Cove for about
ten minutes talking kayak stuff and then headed back, thinking how good a coffee was going to be when
we got back to St. Philips….
When we got back to the cove I looked over
and Tony’s helmet was covered in a layer of ice…
There was more ice in the channel as we came
in, and the marina had more ice in it than I remembered when we left...
But we pushed our way through without much
difficulty and went into the river to rinse off…
Tony keeps his car keys in a dry bag which
he puts in his day hatch. Today his day
hatch cover just would not come off after we dragged the kayaks up off the
slipway to the cars. We pried it with a stick, a paddle, and cold fingers but we just could not
get it to budge. We suspected the
fresh water from washing up in the river was the cause...
I told Tony maybe he should pee on the hatch cover… that
would have been a funny picture and story. Brian
happened to be at the marina when we had arrived back in St. Philips. He brought
a bucket of hot water form the nearby restaurant and Tony poured it over the cover and it
finally came off…
Well, it was a chilly morning for a paddle. But despite frozen skirts and hatch covers we
had a good bit of fun. We had a good laugh at ourselves and the iced up gear...
... and Brian paid for our coffee afterwards, which was greatly appreciated.
We’ll remember today when the warmer weather comes… we’ll be complaining about being in our dry suits on a warm summer day and one of us will say “remember that morning back in January when…”
(See Tony's pics from the morning here...)
