Line Heaving Contest - Video Clips

Well, I may actually do a real post tonight (got out for my first solo paddle in ages yesterday, it was lovely, and it was also a bit surprising to me how many of my J-Bay paddler friends busted loose and went solo yesterday - nice day for it, though) but here's a little fun on my lunch break - yep, more tugboats!

I switched to videos for part of the line-heaving contest & was very happy to capture the 1st and 2nd place heavers (almost said tossers but I think that's an insult some places). There was no 3rd place because there were actually only 2 who snagged the bollard at all. I'd uploaded the 2 succesful throws to YouTube a couple of days after the race; last night I added Meagan Ann's first try because it was such a perfect demonstration of how the fence behind the bollard was causing issues. The Working Harbor folks said this year was unusual, though - it's definitely a tricky setup but they've been using the same bollard for the last few years & they've never seen so many misses!

Here was the 2nd place winner, Buchanan 12. The square bow that renders them less competitive in the race turns into a competitive advantage here, I think, plus they'd already watched a number of other tugs try and fail, and the captain wisely chose a very slow approach. He puts his thrower right where he needs to be & then holds position until the job is done. No record-breaker, sure (in fact it's 1:30 in the video when the thrower really starts organizing himself for the throw) but good enough for second place this year!

And then, of course, the Meagan Ann came back for her 2nd run (each tug gets 2). I believe that proper innertubes parlance for this would be "FTW". For The Win. I mean, like, totally. I had almost switched back to photo mode for this run but there was suddenly this sense among the crowd that maybe this was going to be the winning run (I heard more than one person saying things like "He's gonna get it this time", and they'd come so close in their first try) and I decided to stick with video, and I was glad I did, this was just beautifully done.