Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Poor Lewis!

Sorry to interrupt my cheesesteak story - I will get back to The Good, The Not-Bad, and The Totally Lame tomorrow, if not tonight. I'm still at work right now, just taking a short break. March is like that.
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Oh, poor Lewis Colam. He's the young Brit who's rowing the Intracoastal Waterway to raise funds for Alzheimer's research right now. I'm in a crazy time at work right now, so I've been enjoying following along, having a little vicarious adventure watching the SPOT track progress & listening to his daily updates. I've been pretty impressed by his sticktoitiveness - he's here on a 90 day visa so he hasn't got unlimited time, and that meant that when Florida welcomed him with a week of 30kt winds from the wrong direction, he didn't have the luxury of holing up until things calmed down - nope, he sat out the one worst day when winds were up to 35kts, but other than that, I think he managed to claw out at least a few miles every day. The business about going out to sea to avoid the gators never happened, he's stayed entirely within the ICW, he's made a couple of decent judgement calls, he's met a lot of nice folks, and his average mileage per day has been hovering right around where it needs to be if he's going to make it to NYC (although he hasn't got much of a margin for weather, health issues, etc. right now, needs to pick up some mileage to get that back).

I say "poor Lewis", though, because the day before yesterday, he got a hard lesson in which Florida critter it is that you REALLY need to watch out for when you're boating.

T'ain't gators, nope.
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Thursday morning update - Well, I listened to yesterday's update just before I went home and he sounded much more cheerful. He's trying so hard to be optimistic, it's fun listening to him - the critter incident really got him down, but then yesterday he told a story about a gentleman coming running out to him from an island and giving him a sandwich and a "packet of crisps" and an iced tea (his reaction to the tea was funny, he mentioned that being British, he thinks of tea as purely a hot drink, but he found he liked it, and just being handed a nice cold drink in the middle of the day was such a wonderful & unexpected luxury) and then some extra ice which he used on a sore knee - made his day & it actually sounds like it made up for the furry-bandit trauma.

He does a very nice job with these little updates.

I do hope he does get moving a little better - I recalculated his average after he finished last night & right now he's a tiny bit behind a pace that will get him to NY. He's dipped below and managed to bring it back up before, though.

http://www.iamfine.com/index.php/site/challenge

5 comments:

HT said...

Thanks for posting the link for Lewis, I was wondering how he was doing...now I can follow him too. Poor guy, I know what racoons are capable of doing and it is amazing to see what they can do. I live in the mountains of P.A, and I have one around my house that's been here for 15 years.The one good thing about having him around is that he loves leftovers, so I never have a smelly garbage can indoors. I just put the old food out at nite, and he does his thing.

bonnie said...

I went to the Sweetwater Kayak Symposium one year and they warned us that you basically had to leave whatever food you had locked in your car. The raccoons had no problems unlatching coolers, opening drybags and hatches or unzipping tents - and if you tried to stymie them by tying the zipper tabs of your tent together they would just tear their way in through the side. I don't drive much & at one point I was trying to figure out if I could cut down costs by taking a bus to the park. Ended up renting in part because the warnings made it sound like you needed a car to use as a food locker.

bonnie said...

And I don't think they have anything quite like a raccoon in England, do they? :D

O Docker said...

We've got a troupe of them patrolling the marina.

The last time my boat was hauled out (and I was staying aboard overnight in the boatyard), there were muddy raccoon footprints on deck when I got up in the morning.

They had to climb a 10-foot ladder to get there.

bonnie said...

Cheeky little buggers!

We've got them in my neighborhood - local blogger Flatbush Gardener likes to take pictures of the ones that frequent his garden, and although I can't find it now I remember him telling a story about one actually finding one in a room on the second floor of their home one day. Before that, I'd just been surprised when I was coming home late one night & realized that the large cat that was crossing the street in front of my apartment wasn't a cat at all.