I’m stiff as a board after my first Kayaking lesson. It started badly, with my boat turning out to be too small for my weight and creating serious buoyancy issues. I went in thinking that I was going to get wet, and so I guess I wasn’t surprised when I went in when trying to get out of the boat! <\/p>\n
Anyway, things went better with the new boat. For a while anyway. We were warned about 2 things on the river: Swans and Rowers. Within seconds of starting we met a Swan swimming with her cygnets. Great position if you were looking for a photo op, but not if you wanted to stay safe. So we all pulled in. Once the ‘danger’ had passed, one of the University teams rowed by.. I suppose it was apt that we met them immediately after being warned. We paddled down to the left and then under one of the bridges, which turned out to be a dead end. <\/p>\n
Despite getting this far I still couldn’t get the hang of paddling comfortably (except backways), and after one hard turn, managed to capsize! Too funny. Anyway, the instructor, Jamie, and my mate Chris did a standard rescue and I ended up back in the boat. It’s all Chris’ fault I was there so it was funny he had to do the rescue. <\/p>\n
Jamie did empty a lot of water our of the boat, but still left a fair amount in. I found it even harder to control with the water sloshing about. I struggled up the river and even with Chris encouraging me along, there was too much water in the boat to control it with my lack of experience. I finally managed to get back to dry land, empty the water and get back in again… much better. <\/p>\n
I paddled about for a bit, did my official capsize and hopped out of the water… Phew! I was glad to get out. In spite of it being a major fail mostly, I had a ball and am looking forward to Wednesday’s lesson already. If the stiffness subsides \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1574","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1574","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1574"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1574\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1574"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1574"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.seanmcfoto.com\/smcc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1574"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}