Practices are going well

Our crew paddled for the first time together yesterday.

We practiced full boat switches where all 6 paddlers jump out of the boat and the other 6 team mates waiting in the water pull themselves into the boat to take over. This will be a very important part of our race on Saturday as each crew (male and female) can only paddle for 30 minutes, and then they have to switch out otherwise we are given a time penalty.

The first few switches were ok, but they got considerably better toward the end of the morning practice. Our hawaiian steers-people are excited for the opportunity to race on Saturday and are looking forward to a decent performance from our crew.

We went for an ~2 hour paddle in the afternoon where we worked on pushing through the waves and catching some surf on the way in.

Here is a link to a video that I took from my waterproof camera that was strapped to the iaku of the boat (the "bars" which hold our ama (pontoon type portion of the boat). You can see up to seat 3 in the OC6 - unfortunately I couldn't get a decent angle for the remainder of the paddlers in the boat.

http://youtu.be/gir9jdG913o

In other updates, life in Hanalei is super relaxed both for the locals and the tourists. We have been hanging out between practices, enjoying the opportunity to take a bit of downtime - enjoying the beach, snoozing and catching up on some summer reading.

This place has been home to many movie sets including "The Descendents" and "Jurrasic Park". At every shot I see of the NaPali coastline, I think to myself whether this is where the helicopter flies into Jurrasic Park during the opening shots.

Tomorrow the plan is to go for a paddle in the morning, followed by a hike of the NaPali coastline in the afternoon. We've been told that the trail can be treacherous, approximately 2 feet wide on the side of a cliff that drops to the ocean. This should be interesting ;)

For the race, for anyone interested in following, we will have a SPOT GPS transmitter hooked up to our boat. You can follow the 40 mile race and see where we are on the course if you like. The race starts at 8am HST, which is about 6 hours behind Ottawa.

http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0mvOaKZK0yyvWGcbfctv6pEiT5hgM19Qd


Hope everything and everyone back home is great - and I'll see you in a week!

Aloha!