August 27th, 2015
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Our monthly after work pizza and beer paddle in Newport Harbor. Which this month just so happened to fall on an unusually strong tide. Oops...
We had a lot of signups this time and even with the usual last minute churn we ended up with 12 people and 10 boats. Not a bad turnout!
We only had two of the inflatables in use this time which was good. Especially the tandem tends to require a lot of additional work to keep up with the hard side boats. We're having more people go and rent from Sports Chalet or get their own boats now.
We generally don't pay much attention to the tide and go paddling when we have time. This time we just happened to head out at the worst possible time. Not only was the tide coming in as we were leaving and out as we came back but it was a damn strong tide.
We launched and all promptly started drifting backwards. Even the fast boats like mine had to work to move forward and the inflatable and hard sided tandems had an even worse time.
Still, pizza and beer does motivate and we only have about an hour and a half to get to Pizza Nova before we risk them closing the kitchen. Everyone rallied and fortunately it got easier once we crossed under the bridge and the channel widened.
We reached Pizza Nova only a bit behind schedule.
They're starting to recognize us here and had let us take over the corner again. We'd all worked rather hard to get here so the food tasted extra good. Korean Spicy Wings + Italian Meat Pizza + beer!
Then of course we paddled back. I look forward to this part since the water is a lot calmer after dark and any wind has generally died down. While people worry about the lack of light it's actually just about perfect with the lights from shore.
Unfortunately the tide was now coming out so the last section between the bridge and Newport Aquatic Center was again more work than usual.
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