Shropshire Paddlesport Blog

Last year’s race at Fladbury is remembered mainly for the Lambo-jelly car key incident.  We forgot that it is actually quite a hard race.  It startts downstream which means you paddle upstream when you’re half-way tired.  Still, we did OK with Cam and Tim looking good in the lightnings, Rose winning U10 girls by a substantial margin despite being stonewalled by a flock of swans about 20 yards into the race.

Matt did well in his first K1 race coming 3rd but just avoiding promotion which is what he wanted in his first solo outing and Will was looking tidy to come in mid-field.

Kate & Dave were once again just beaten into second place by Jenny and Tom who, if they didn’t get promoted on that performance split up and race K1 for a while - leaving the gold spot free for the sub-mariners should they choose to avail themselves of it.  They were just 6 seconds ahead of Fladbury’s Sam Ingles and Josh Critchley one of whom managed to swim out of their OC2 just infront of the rowing club and after a quick swim, a run along the back they ppicked up the speed and came fourth.  Brilliant effort guys!   (How anybody can stay upright in an OC is still beyond me but that one can fall out and one can stay in really impressed me).

The Mopheads christened their new boat on the river and came a commendable fouth, beaten out of priszes by 1 second.  Bad luck guys but it was god to get the boat out on the river in advance of the finals next weekend.

Ellie & I made a tactical error; two actually and they were probably both my fault.  The first one was saying to Dave “Don’t worry about tightening up the footrest, its fine as it is and if you tighten it with a spanner I’ll never get it off again” and the second was saying to Ellie “Shall we race in div 7 and see how we get on?”  The downstream bit of the race was OK although we were struggling to stay with the div 6 & 7 paddlers.  The way back was harder; it was upstream, the front footrest came off jamming the rudder we lost all directional control and Ellie lost most of her power trying to kick against nothing.  We didn’t come last though (and were only 20 seconds behind the folk who won div 8 and they didn’t have a broken boat) .  And we will race div 7 again, but not for a while!!!

All in all no car keys were lost, no vehicles broken into, prizes won and we all had a good day out.

And we found a nice man who is going to make us some green and white spray decks;  he leant me a couple and I promised to return them next weekend.  He nearly managed to keep the surprise out of his voice when he asked if we were going to Burton!!!

Are we going to the finals?  Oh yeah!  Bring it on.