A herioc effort

 At the time, it seemed like a good idea :-) As you can see on the pictures, there was quite a storm raging over Belgium. I was keeping a close watch at the waterlevels of a small river that is very close to my home. A river that you are only able to kayak on when there is a lot of water flowing. As it happened to be on that rather windy 7th of march. I told my boss I needed to be somewhere, dropped everything I needed in the new and improved Kayak van and drove to the starting point.

Meanwhile it had stopped raining and the wind was laying low, I felt like a million bucks and launched myself into the 'rapid' flowing river. What was the most exciting part of it? That I had to cross one little dam and I was determined to do this without portaging. A first and a rather enjoyable experience I will be repeating in the near future. What I hadn't counted on was the second, slightly bigger dam that came next. Luckily our summertraining paid off and I stayed upright, barely. Yes I told myself, you are king of the world, a feeling that I lost quite soon when the river turned right into the wind. That day there were windspeeds up to 100kph and I can tell you, it is impossible to move ahead if you get caught by one. But after an hour of praying, pleading and a bit of blasphemy I reached the safe compounds of my home. Which I could not enter because my keys where still in the van. So, after some breaking and entering I had secured an old bike with a leaky back tire to drive back to my van, still in my kayak getup. After two kilometers of battling the blasting wind, I came to the conclusion that I left the key of the van lying next to my garage. Lets just say that when eventually I got to the van I was quite proud of my achievement. In the great scheme of things a rather small one but it felt as if I had just obtained a great personal victory!!. :-)