Hey Crew
Hope everyone had an excellent long weekend and a good start to Stampede! It was admittedly nice after two big weekends of paddling to take a break from practice and meet up with a bunch of you at Aussie Rules. Thanks to everyone who came out and to Shannon for organizing...
On to Lethbridge recap. Where to start?! In my roughly 8 years of paddling with CDBC I've never encountered bad weather in Lethbridge (to be fair, I missed the one year it poured) so you can imagine my chagrin when we pulled in Friday to lots of wind and rain. Not the best way to start a weekend. In addition to the poor weather, it seemed like many paddlers were either just coming down with or getting over colds. Yuck!
Despite the double dose of cold(s) we persevered...
Yahoo Angels paired up with Catch 22 to form C22 Angels. It was a match made in heaven! Despite never having paddled together, the ladies hit together and came out strong right from the very first race. The boat felt really great and comments from the shoreline were that we "looked awesome" and "timing was excellent"! C22 Angels efforts earned them a Gold in the Women's A Division with a time of 2:19.22. The next closest time was 2:27.39 - so quite an impressive lead.
Crew Yahoo was a bit shakier out of the gate. At first, we had some trouble nailing our starts. We were still fast enough to be 3rd after the first day of racing and get into in the A Division semi finals. We maintained that 3rd place position moving into the A Division Final but it was a real dog fight to secure a silver medal! Got Gainz edged us out of gold by roughly a second (Gainz 2:08.41; Yahoo 2:09.38). Catch 22 was also hot on our tail in the final (2:10.21) followed very closely by Top Made Black (2:10.51). Only 2 seconds between the 1st and 4th place team...congratulations to everyone on a well-fought battle!
...I forgot to mention that the sun came out intermittently on Race Day 2 but really shone in time for us to convene for a post-racing beverage and to enjoy the medal presentation.
Hopefully everyone that attended enjoyed the festival.
Stay healthy - a little over a month to go before Calgary!
Cheers,
