The wind is swirling around the trees, coming from all directions at once. The heat of the morning causes air currents to rush between the hot land and cool water, giving me a hard time controlling the kayak in the cross winds. Then it increases and turns head on as I cross towards the finish, giving me a final work out.

It’s mid Summer in southern Australia so you expect hot dry northerly winds to pop up unexpectedly. We get the dry conditions whilst northern Australia get torrential rain, with cyclone Sean threatening the north west coast. I think I choose the dry rather than the wet.

My training session started well with calm conditions and intentions of a 10km steady cadence paddle and finish with short sprints. It’s been 30 odd years since I paddled a K1 race kayak. What was I thinking when I decided to get back into a fast, unstable racer and try Wild Water Kayak Racing ?. The experts say you need to keep active as the years creep up and I’m certainly feeling the activity this morning, with lots of power needed in the sprints as well as core strength to keep this damn thing upright.

Some of the locals came down to investigate as I launched the kayak.

It was quite calm early in the paddle and I even relaxed a little to take in the scenery. Passing close to the old tower was interesting, however, I hadn’t counted on the swirling current at its base.

The tower has a little lean but the weather vain still works. It has been underwater since 1897 when the small village was flooded to create water storage.

Here’s the Tower before inundation

Training finished. So now we can concentrate on coffee and cake and showing off my great heart rate and speed stats from my smart watch. Oh bugger, I pressed the wrong button, again. “Session deleted”. I need glasses !

The only rough water training I’ve had lately is playing around in the surf, which I hope will help me when I hit the rapids later in the year. Here’s a short video of our small surf fun.
Have a great mid Summer day.