elk lake isn't warm in april

Oh, dear lord.

So we were all rowing merrily along this afternoon on Elk Lake, when all of a sudden, two of our rowers got out of sync, and got their oars caught in the water. We started to tilt to starboard. So, being the "experienced" rower that I am, I decided to compensate by depressing the flat side of my oar against the surface of the lake in order to counteract the forces pulling us to starboard.

But there was one thing...

My oar wasn't squared against the surface of the water. Oh no, it was perpendicular. So what happened? I too got my oar caught, and contributed to the forces pulling us over. The boat started to slowly tilt, and I though "Well, we've tipped this far before, and we always recover." Except we didn't. All of a sudden, Elk Lake was filling our boat over the starboard gunnel, and we swamped the boat and flipped.

That's right, we flipped the boat, dumping all of us rather unceremoniously into the lake. The cold, cold lake. And when you are rowing, your feet are velcroed into shoes that are fastened to the boat. So as we started to swamp, someone yelled "FEET!" and we all tried to pull the emergency release on our shoes before we went right over. Luckily, we did. Another bit of luck: the coach boat was following us, and they have life preservers.

So there we are, beaching ourselves over our capsized boat, and we are thinking "the coach boat will pick us up, and we'll go back to the boathouse and dry off/warm up." Except that when you flip a $15,000+ boat, its recovery become fairly important. And so we had to STAY in the freezing lake, remove all of the oars from the boat, and pass them into the coach boat. Then, we had to flip the boat back to upright. Then we got to climb into the coach boat. But wait, we have to tow the boat back to shore. Well, there is nothing more exciting than freezing your ass of in wet clothes, with no shoes, while leaning out the side of the coach boat to hold a swamped/sinking rowing shell beside you as you creep back to the boathouse.

Once we got to shore, we all got to shower, which was fortunate. It was also fortunate that I had brought a towel in my backpack today. It was unfortunate that I had no change of clothes. So off with everything (including skivvies), a hot shower, then putting on the wet swimsuit (ick), and helping bring the submerged boat back up to the boathouse.

Needless to say, an eventful day.

Now my warm, cozy bed is beckoning. I think I shall heed its call.