Cardinal Harbour "practice swim" and race

Today's excursion was the Cardinal Harbour Open Water Swim, used by some athletes as a practice event for their swim during the Ironman event coming in a couple weeks.

I got my kayak wet for the second time at this event (my first time at this event was last year).

While it's not as busy a time on the water as Ironman is for me, I enjoyed it. I didn't really feel like hauling my boat to Cardinal Harbour, well out Rose Island Road, by bicycle. The terrain isn't too bad, nor is the distance (thirteen miles or so), but on the roads in question, at that distance, pulling the trailer at an average speed of ten miles an hour, I would have had an unpleasant bike ride. Motorists on US42 have little patience for cyclists, as that and River Road are key corridors for cyclists training in preparation for the Ironman event. Sometimes it's just not worth the hassle to do a thing by bicycle.

I made mention of this on a local kayakers' forum, and was offered a ride by a fellow I had met when I DID use my bike to pull my kayak to the Buckhead Border Challenge Triathlon in July.

En route to the event, I realized that I had left my GoPro at home, and decided that we didn't have time to go back for it. I plan to have it in use during the swim portion of the Ironman, in effort to show a sense of how amazing it is to see a thousand people swimming by (out of the roughly 2700 who will start that race--it's hard to see all of them at one time!). I had the camera on during portions of the Border Challenge swim, and while I wasn't disappointed with what I got as a starter point, I wanted to try some different ideas this time. Phooey!

Once on the water, I had a new reason for wanting to have my camera: One of the other boaters had her dog on the back of her sit-on-top kayak. The dog, a Golden Retriever, had her own PFD (or is that CFD, for Canine Floatation Device?), and was quite comfortable with being on the water. She obviously had done this quite a bit in her two years of life. She (the dog) even understands how to drink from a water bottle! I kept wondering what she was thinking about all those humans in the water--she sometimes looked like she wanted to jump in and play (although I was told that she doesn't jump in the water from the boat--she will, of course, enjoy a swim from shore, since she is a Golden Retriever!). I kept expecting her to bark at the swimmers who had gotten off course, but I suppose she was letting her human handle that task.

In two weeks or so, I plan to be on the river for the Ironman practice swim and the swim portion of the Ironman race itself. Hopefully, I will figure out how I want to capture video by then, and remember the silly camera!