Two 3.7-mile city rides, despite the day of the week, because the mandatory face-show for the race happened to take place next door to Dot Org. It meant I could put my bike in the building as usual and not carry a lock.
My plan was to attend two clinics in the morning--a course overview and a first-timers' hand-holding--and register as soon after 12:15, when last names A-L were welcome, as I could. I arrove at the site to a big line, but hooray, it was only for 10 o'clock entry to the exposition, not the registration line. I had glazed over the "exposition" bit, but oh yes, in addition to clinics and registration there were things to buy. I found out vital things, like my race and wave numbers, and picked up my mandatory swim cap and non-mandatory lime-green advertisement-shirt. The course overview Oprah-lecturer said the one thing she advised us to get today--because everything else we should have worn before and trust--was open-water goggles. I did that, and planned to test them in Chatfield Reservoir, where we were going now to spend more of the afternoon paddling than we thought when I was going to have to wait until 12:15 to show my face and pick up my chip and sign my waiver and have my limbs marked with my number and bond with my fellow participants.
Luckily the bonding wasn't mandatory.
So we spent the afternoon paddling at Chatfield and, for me, drinking even more water than usual. In a small inlet, upstream of an old beaver dam, I saw fish jumping. I suggested portaging around the dam, and then we could sit in our kayaks against the dam, RDC fishing, me reading. This was a fine plan except for the mosquitoes. So we didn't. We found a beach not quite deserving of the name on the main body of the lake and ate our sandwiches, and then I settled in the private shade of a small cottonwood to read The Persian Boy--first in line regular-sized paperback, after library books, which I wouldn't risk even in a drybag. I propped my 100-oz. Camelbak bladder on my camera and used it as a pillow even as I emptied it. Meanwhile RDC tried to fish from his kayak, but it's no float tube, so he gave up on that, and from shore he couldn't cast far enough to be deep enough.
Upon leaving, RDC tugged his kayak into the water and immediately slid in, whereupon one inflatable chamber burst from its zipper. Luckily it didn't break the zipper, but it did mean that he had to sit with his right leg bent nearly out of the cockpit and paddle with his right arm straight out. Or something. After that, I let Watership Up gradually acclimate from hot sand and sun to warm shallows to paddling depth and only then clambered in. All this meant that our plan to swim off the kayaks, within the buoy line but far enough from shore that I, at least, might be able to overlook the muck at the bottom that shore isn't deep enough to mask, was out. When we got back our starting point, hooray, I had lost--in the car? on the beach? as we carried the kayak between car and tree-shade and water? part of the pump valve, which meant that we couldn't reshape RDC's boat and go out again. And I wasn't about to swim there, near the fishing beach and small-boat launch, when I couldn't see my feet in water that didn't reach my knees.
I didn't try the open-water goggles, which give you a larger field of vision than regular socket-only goggles, but that was fine because I couldn't find them anyway when I finished packing Saturday night.