For you then, here is a newsy type update: This year's MR 340 has been postponed until August 24th. So if you've been checking this blog 20 times a day and thinking all the Paddlephiles must have drowned, be at ease.
I'm quite confident I speak for 90% of all racers and 100% of all Paddlephiles when I say WHEW! Kudos to Scott and everyone at Rivermiles for making the tough call, it was absolutely the right one.
Let me tell you why:
On a recent weekend we decided it was time to take Morning Wood out for a little shakedown cruise. Just a 30 mile or so jaunt from Kaw Point to the Cooley Lake access ramp. To make it 'fun' we decided to camp there overnight. It seemed like a fine idea as we've camped there before and it's a nice little spot.
The Put In
We didn't pick Kaw Point at random. We start there because the race starts there. The first thing we noticed was that long beautiful boat ramp that held over a hundred boats in queue before the launch last year is now all but completely submerged. Had there been 100 more boats there we would have been backed up to the highway. Now at the time, the race had not been postponed. We could see the impending clusterf!#k and immediately starting disussing alternate put in options. We could lower the boat and crew from a nearby bridge over the Kaw with some sort of pulley contraption or rent a helicopter from the nearby downtown airport perhaps.
Here is a detailed schematic of the plan we settled on.
We are currently awaiting approval from race coordinators but I don't foresee any issues there.
The Water:
Well, technically I don't think you can even call this stuff water anymore. It's so muddy that any point under 8 feet deep is just gelatinous goop. It looks like water, but when you step in it it becomes instant setting cement and you'll be lucky to get your foot back, let alone any shoes or boots you may have been wearing. It's also so toxic you'll probably just be pulling back a bloody stump. You see when the river is as high as it is right now, it floods numerous toxic waste dumps, chemical plants, haunted Indian burial grounds and twinkie factories along it's winding path to Missouri and all that muck ends up in the water. It makes your skin, eyes and nose burn just to get within a mile of it. Prolonged exposure to the fumes has been known to cause everything from alzheimer's to zombieism. River rash is the least of our worries out here.
The Heat: It's a wet heat.
Any qualified rocket scientist will tell you that when you get this much rain in the summer it's going to be f'n humid. I know, I'm a rocket scientist. It was so hot and so humid that your clothes become instantly drenched in sweat the second you get out of the car. Had the water conditions been better I would have jumped in the river to dry off a bit.
Super Bugs:
It's a river, there are going to be bugs. Fine. That's why they make insect repellent. Last year a can of 40% deet was enough to keep me pretty well bite free the entire race. This year, they've mutated. These wet conditions have no doubt increased the numbers of pesky bugs tenfold over last year. Combine that with a lack of tasty campers and fishermen since everything sucks and nobody wants to go outside and you've got a lot of very desperate pests. Imagine you are stranded in the middle of the desert, no water for days. You stumble across a small pool of water with a rancid rodent carcass in it and the whole thing is just DRENCHED in people repellent. You are going to drink that water no matter how awful it tastes and probably eat the rodent too. That's exactly how the bugs see you in these conditions. Deet or no Deet, you're getting bit.
And so it went, with the night offering no cooling breeze nor respite of any kind, and definitely no sleep. At dawn we scurried out of there like roaches when the lights come on. Needless to say nobody wanted to hop back in the boat and do another hundred miles that day. This extra month is a blessing in disguise. Conditions can't really do anything but get better at this point.
Coming Soon: The Boat Build - Declassified
