The Knot Race, Lewes, DE
My dad died on September 14th after a long illness. God bless the hospice care workers. I hadn’t been paddling much all year because he was home on hospice care and I couldn’t go too far from home. When Patti Nash said she wanted to paddle my tandem surfski with me for this race, I said it was ok with me as long as she had no expectations of my performance. Patti is always fun to paddle with, she has a wicked sense of humor.
The directions were to “go to the bridge and turn around.” It sounded so simple to us. Unfortunately we, and quite a number of other people, went in the wrong direction and to the wrong bridge. This was supposed to be a 6 mile race, 3 miles up and 3 back. Over a dozen of us made it a nearly 18 mile race by going to the wrong bridge. The worst part was that at the half way point of the real race course there was a lady waiting for us with cookies and we missed it!
Normally 17some miles are nothing to me, but I hadn’t trained this year, so by the time the 17 was over and we finally saw the dock again, I was ready to get out of the boat. Many stories of everyone’s creative individual detours were told as we all replenished carbs (translation: drank beers) after the race. This race will go down in infamy and Patti and I, along with a lot of other people, will have a lifetime of humorous memories of turning a simple little race into a marathon.
It was a good day.