Canoe boots

It didn't look hopeful when I got up today, the usual symptoms were all present and on the down side of he cycle. In fact I spent almost the whole day unconscious in my groove on the sofa. Time came to leave for Pangbourne and the river...I couldn't face myself if I missed another week so I made an effort, gathered my gear, emptied my pockets of things that might dislike any unexpected encounters with the murky depths, and off I set.

I borrowed one of the river centre's solo boats for a change, lighter and more manoeuvrable than my sixteen footer - also tippier. A slightly less stable boat should not be a problem but I was surprised to find what a difference it makes when my back is as bad as it is at the moment - corrective balancing movements were a lot slower and less automatic. After a few wobbly moments I settled into it though.

We set off downstream along the two or three mile level between Pangbourne and Maple Durham locks, our little pack of four boats strung out across most of the river's width. It was a spectacularly beautiful evening, not a breath of wind and the water like glass. Having a lighter boat I crept out ahead, I was practising paddling silently - recovering from the stroke by slicing the paddle through the water without breaking the surface with the blade - either I'm improving at this or the grebe swimming ahead of me was hard of hearing, in any case I got the bow within a foot of it and followed it in formation for a hundred yards before it spotted me, did a comedic double take and noisily flapped away. The usual wildlife suspects were in evidence, geese, swans etc, less expected was the grass snake that swam past one of the others and the two elderly ladies swimming along midstream - a pair of disembodied heads gliding along on the mirror surface.

The seductive evening, the lighter boat, the downstream current....all too easy to just keep going as the shadows lengthen, forgetting the fact that the return trip will be upstream against the river's flow. About a third of the way back to the slipway I realised I was in trouble but there was nothing for it but to persevere so I just focused on the rhythm, on the next stroke and the next and the next... It was getting dark by the time we got back ....and then there was a mutiny. I still had a little spark of feeling in a side-plate sized patch in the back of my left thigh but that was pretty much it for my legs - I told them to stand up and they leered back defiantly and just sat there. I put the boat into a little floating dock near the slipway. The top of the dock was just a little above my waist and after a couple of attempts I managed to squirm out onto the puddled surface. I lay there for twenty minutes or so as the rest of the group lifted out the boats and carried them back to the boathouse. I eventually managed to get enough control back to get up on my sticks, make profuse apologies to the others and hobble back to the car. Not a good ending but still a very much worthwhile expedition.