First Heats in the Heat

Yesterday was our first chance to see how we perform in the heat.

My shoes were the first casualty. Wardrobe malfunction! My left flip flop broke just after we left our tent to heat to our first race. I hobbled along, but it's very difficult to walk in a shoe with only two of of its three attachments still attached. 

My shoes  made it through marshaling, but as I climbed into the boat, the middle attachment for my right shoe broke. I guess my cheap, made-in-China shoes weren't designed for use in China. 

Whatever. I would rather paddle bare footed anyway. 

The first day of races were festival races. There were local teams and quite a few of the visiting teams competing. My team's first heat was in the afternoon when I'm pretty sure the weather is the hottest. It was also the first time we got into a boat since leaving Portland. We thought we'd be able to warm up, but the races were running behind schedule, so our warm up was moving the boat from the loading dock to the starting line. It was about a 100 foot long warm up. 

It was not our finest race. In fact, the start could be described as awful.  However, we kept at it and taking benches, and we placed third! Ha! 

That got us into the Grand Final, also to take pace in the hot, humid afternoon. 

Power Surge, the other team from Wasabi at these races, also made the Final. HUGE was in lane two, and PS in three. It's very, very cool that we have such a strong club that we have two boats in a Grand Final in a city on the other side of the planet from home.  We had a much better race this time. Our start was more efficient, and the whole boat was tighter. HUGE placed fourth in the Women's International Division in the festival race. 

Our next races are tomorrow, 4 July, about 2 PM local. These will be 2000 meter races, and they should be broadcast live on the Internet. There's a live feed at the bottom of the blog. If you're up, cheer us on!