Nationals #3 - Done and dusted

Well, I feel like writing something but I keep falling asleep in my chair and my shoulder hurts like shit... lekker tye. Sarcasm has been italicised for ease-of-read.

After a fairly disasterous start to the weekend (car-wise at least) we eventually all got to Inanda Dam campsite at 2am. Good, wait... Baaad. We slept for about 3 minutes and then went to Tops Needle for the Sprint and Slalom. Some knob had interfered with the dam release so what was supposed to be a really easy set up turned into a bit of a mission - Neil and I helped move the gates around in the middle of the flow in our kayaks, damn we're hotshit. We had a terrible first run, matched it with an aggresive 2nd run where half the team exploded out of the boat when we hit a hidden rock at "very fast". Good swim, not rocky at all... Our third "safety" run got us third place (tied), but we drew last for the sprint because we had a DNF for the swimming run. We gave it horns in the sprint, even though Justin managed to swim somewhere in between getting off the bank and getting into the boat... good. After laughing our heads off till half-way down the rapid (when we saw we were heading for the massive "wrapping rock") we ended up taking a pretty good line around it and almost took second. But, we hit a rock, losing second and then hit another one, almost losing third.

The girls came second in sprint and slalom (to the other girls) and also managed to lose a team member - although they picked her up and managed to finish the run...

So that was that - it started raining and we retired to the campsite for some beer and OBS. It carried on raining, and we had some awesome dinner. It rained a bit more. Kevin showed up in ridiculousy spiky slops (and very bright headlights) on his way to the MTB party...

The next day was about 50 degrees in the shade, at 9am. Downriver started at 11 (was supposed to start earlier but the same knob had fiddled the water release for this day too). We won the trash-talking competition, and the race into the first rapid. This time we were a bit too close to the rock, but it all ended well. The steering was a little difficult, partly because there were a million stealth rocks all over the place, and partly because my steering strokes were like those of a big girls blouse because I'd done some extreme-upside-down-kayaking down the sprint rapid a little earlier.

Anyway, the upshot of it all: We (mens and ladies teams) were the second most consistent sides in the series, and both got silver. Good.

Good luck to the SA teams going to Worlds.