Chattahoochee River

My brother and his girlfriend have invited me to go paddle boarding with them a few times. In the past, something has always come up, but just over a month ago, it all worked out.

The plan was to put in at some park in Roswell, paddle up to this rock, somewhere upstream, party for a few hours, then float back. Having never done anything vaguely like that since I was a kid in a canoe at summer camp in the '80s, I had no idea if that would be easy, hard, fun, work, or suffering. John assured me that it would be easy: "This is not what I think of as a performance sport." But, you never really know until you try. Eg. John can tread water, pretty much indefinitely, but I have a hell of a time with it. I must just be doing something wrong but nobody has been able to demonstrate what or how to fix it.

We arrived at what we thought was the right place, but it turned out not to be. Fortunately we hadn't unpacked much when we figured it out.

The right place was a few miles away, and it turned out I'd been there before, several times. Once while exploring some trail, once more hiking with Kathryn at the Wells Tract, and a third time when I'd ridden from Cumming to downtown Atlanta and back.

John unloaded everything and inflated the paddle boards. The whole process was alien, but it all made sense mechanically. The only strange thing was the diverse and unintuitive mechanisms for attaching the fins.

I put in and paddled around a bit, trying to figure it all out. If you look up paddle boarding on youtube you find lots of videos of people falling, and just intiutively it seems super unstable - like trying to ride a skateboard with your feet together, facing forward. It turns out though, yeah, it's pretty easy. You have plenty of balance. Or, I did at least. Turning was the trickiest part for me, you have to actually actively paddle yourself in a circle to turn, you don't just lean or do some subtly different stroke. This one lady Marianna (I think) could tell I was a noob and demonstrated some of it. That really helped.

Before long, I had marginally adequate skills to start heading upriver, and so we did. I almost crashed into Kseniya and then almost fell off of the board almost immediately, but fortunately neither happened, and we proceeded without incident from there. I tried to stay with the lead group, in case something went wrong, my brother and Kseniya would catch up to me and potentially help.

I want to say about 1/3rd of the way up we all stopped at some dock and hung out for a bit. John was right though, it was not especially strenuous. I mean, you could make it difficult if you wanted, but keeping up with pretty much everybody else wasn't wearing me out. Another 1/3rd of the way up we stopped at a sandbar for a while. The stops were cool because you could socialize a bit. IDK what other people do, but I couldn't easily keep a conversation going while paddling. I'd be too far away, or too focused on what I was doing.

I did figure out a few things, but they were all contradictory... You can move faster in still water. The water is more still where it's deep, but it's also more still where it's super shallow. The outside of a bend tends to be shallow and the inside deep, but the water moves much faster on the inside of a bend, and it's more turbulent. The outside is a longer disance. So, aim for still water as close to the inside of the bend as you can reasonbly be?

It's apparently better if you use your core by bending at your waist than by just using your arms. Quick strokes are good sometimes, long strokes other times. It's difficult to keep from pulling to the right or left, but that's where all your efficiency is wasted...

Lots of stuff that's probably intuitive to people who've done it more than once, I'm sure.

We finally got to the party rock after paddling for many hours.

And, man it was a party!

This is the board I'd been piloting.

Apparently you want to keep as much of it as possible in the water on a hot day like that one. One of the boards exploded while we were sitting there, just from the heat increasing the pressure inside of it.

We hung on on the rocks for quite a while. I'd brought a couple of bottles of gatorade and two chicken sandwiches from Waffle House to eat. It was plenty of food, but I wish I'd had more to drink.

I'm not 100% sure where we were, but I'm pretty sure I could find it again. There were a bunch of rocks where we were, and upstream, there was an island.

Apparently this specific get-together happens annualy, and this guy Dave always brings steak up to the rock, cooks it with a blowtorch, and lets everybody have a go at it:

We stayed at the rock for a couple of hours, and I reapplied sunscreen religiously. I can ride around on the roads or in the woods all day, but it's not the same as being on the water.

Eventually the party broke up and everybody started floating home.

Me and John and Kseniya linked our boards together.

By "linked" I mean put feet on each other's boards and roughly held them together like that.

We stopped at the sandbar on the way back for a few minutes, but nobody really wanted to prolong the day at that point, so that didn't last too long.

I don't remember what time we got back, but I do remember that I could already see that I was burned well before we were off the water. Ugh.

The next day, I was properly burned.

It took about a week for most of me to heal. My ankles though... Good lord. I guess wearing socks prevented them from healing. A week later they were as red as ever. If I'd stand for more than about 10 seconds in one position, one or the other would hurt terribly. I could shuffle around to fix it, but try doing that when you're trying to pee. Sitting down didn't help. If I wasn't lying down, my feet had to be moving. I eventually started wearing my barefoot shoes everywhere and it made all the difference in the world. The healing began, and before long I was super blistered. I remember me and the kids were watching some movie, I had my right ankle on my left knee, and i suddenlty I felt a torrent of water pour down my left leg. Apparently the various blisters had coalesced and busted open all at once. I couldn't believe how much fluid poured out. It looked like someone had spilled a drink on the theater floor. Sorry about that, theater people. It took over a month to fully heal.

So, paddle boarding is pretty fun. It's less about being active, and more about hanging out, like light hiking, I guess, but that counts as fun. I'll defintiely be doing more of it, if I get the chance.