utenzi

I did a lot of hiking this past weekend but no paddling. So I decided that paddling after work today was an excellent idea. As you can see from this picture, the setting was quite lovely. Unfortunately I was stuck in a canoe with the world's worst paddler. This guy was a public menace! Whichever side of the canoe he was paddling on, he scooted all the way over to the edge of the canoe. I was doing all I could to keep us from tipping over. At times I couldn't paddle because I was holding the sides of the boat as I leaned over the edge to keep from capsizing. And despite being out there for 2 hours, he never got any better. If anything, as he tired out (the wimp!) he just got worse. The lack of paddling pictures is because I never dared pull out my camera. We were in constant danger of going over. Grrrrrr.

In the wee hours of the day I did my normal 3am -- 7am drive to my parent's house. My brother joined us for a few hours in the morning but he wasn't able to stay away from work for long. The excessively hot weather this summer has wracked havoc on his golf course (he's a golf course superintendent), especially the bent grass greens. They're just burnt right up. After Craig left to go back to Atlanta, Dad went to church and Mom and I read for a while. Due to my late night and all it was very difficult to stay awake so finally I figured that hitting the water for some paddling might wake me up a bit. It would have been better to have been on the water in the early morning but any time of day is better than no paddling at all. :-) So I went kayaking for a bit in the afternoon. Since it was so hot with lots of direct sun I kept it down to an hour and a half out on the water. Still, I was soaked with sweat by the time I got back as you can see in this picture. Good exercis...

On Sunday I went paddling with a Meetup kayaking group. We went to Harris Lake which serves as a water reservoir for a nuclear plant . Here's the Wiki on the place: The Shearon Harris Nuclear Generating Station is a nuclear power plant with a single Westinghouse designed pressurized-water nuclear reactor operated by Progress Energy. Located in New Hill, North Carolina, in the United States, about 20 miles (30 km) southwest of Raleigh, it generates 900 MWe, has a 523 foot (160 m) natural draft cooling tower, and uses Harris Lake for cooling. The reactor achieved criticality in January 1987 and began providing power commercially on May 2 of that year. I've got two pictures that juxtapose paddlers with the nuclear plant. For some reason the appearance of the large cooling tower in the back with the kayaks and paddlers in the foreground is appealing to me. Some might find alarm in that "scary" image of the cooling tower, billowing hot steam, or maybe in the smaller but p...