‘Oh my gosh, I think I have rheumatoid arthritis’, I say to my wife, struggling to grip my coffee mug and maneuver the ambrosia towards my face-hole. She (predictably) rolls her eyes. After twelve years of monogamy she doesn’t have to humor my… eh… endearing ratiocination that everything is an autoimmune disease.
It feels like chronic wanking cramp. Eh… Or rather from what I’ve read and heard… from friends… this is what it, probably, feels like. Although mine is from gripping a paddle1, and not from beating the one-eyed trouser snake to death.
[1] My Viking ancestors are busy barricading the doors to Valhalla with heavy furniture.
We got ourselves a sea-kayak. A massive hunk of orange plastic that is (purportedly) shark-resistant and basically unsinkable. It’s second hand and a little scuffed but otherwise, as far as I can tell with my very limited nautcial-ness, perfectly seaworthy. (those might be famous last words)
I took the wives car into Cape Town, thinking it would be easier to navigate that metropolises insanely tight alley ways with the Mokka, not thinking that transporting the kayak back home on such a narrow roof rack would be quite… daunting. Lets go with that.
In any event, I made it back alive and with my plastic hotdog sausage still attached and not (as I was vividly imagining) catapulted through someones windshield and decapitating everyone inside. Which would have been super inconvenient for everyone involved2.
[2] Although probably nothing a sponge and soapy water couldn’t fix. It seems quite indestructible that way.
Yesterday was our maiden voyage!
The seas have been insanely rough this last week. Five meter swells and a foamy, apocalyptic surf zone, nice for body boarding, but not ideal conditions to take the girls out for their first jaunt. And so we settled on the river for which our little village is named.
Its only really navigable for the last two kilometers or so, once it exits the elevation change off the mountain and dumps out into the lagoon, but that’s still quite a bit of surface area that is navigable and cheerfully level.
So maybe a kilometer from where we launched to the beach and then back again… I was tired and passed out by 9pm. Ha ha. And now this morning, struggling to grip.
For some reason I think of the Last of Mohicans. And how impossible it would have been for Daniel Day-Lewis to out paddle the Huron on the river after escaping the ambush. That scene upsets me now. Although maybe it was the Delaware, but whoever the antagonists, there is no way they out stroked four committed scalpers.
Also, my performance was woeful. And definitely needs to be addressed. At some point. In the future. Preferably before I die.
Go Darke 