So this weekend there was the new england paddling show over in Durham NH. We went saturday and attended some of the seminars and oogled the gear. They even had some demonstrations in the pool which convinced me that I really wanted to practice some of combat strokes some more because the demonstrators made them look so easy. Despite all my oogling of gear, I didn’t manage to come out with the one thing I was looking for: a dry top. Tyson has a dry top by Stohlquist of which he is quite fond. So I went and looked at the women’s version, and along with changing the lines so it would fit better, they put an extra seam at the top of the neck which made it impossible to get on and off and made it less waterproof, and as far as I could tell had no good reason for being there. _grr_

So then in the balmy weather on sunday, we plunked our boats down in a local stream/river. The guidebook said it tends to get too shallow during the summer, so we wanted to catch it during spring melt. It was a really pretty trip. I wandered through swampy meadows and some of the local woods we had been skiing through. However, when I say wander, I mean “meander with really tight turns.” Here I am paddling down this river with my 16′ boat and it keeps doing hairpin turns with radii of three to four times that length. It was good practice for turning because it was nice calm water where I didn’t have to worry about tipping over when edging my boat as hard as I could.

In non-paddling news, two weeks ago, Tyson finally got around to doing his biannual flight review, so friday afternoon when I got home from work and it was so nice and sunny out, I convinced him to take me out for a ride.