Calico Moon Boat 3337

We left the house at 4:30 to get to Kaw point early enough for me to put in for the solo start. We started putting together both Amber's boat and mine. We got light and seats set up. We got it all together and there was a huge line to the ramp. Aaron came down to see us off with one of his coworkers. He said we put in on the point last year and it was easy. There was a couple boats putting in there but only on the exact point. We carried my boat down to the right of the point and I got in the water up to about my waist. I hopped in and then sponged out the water I carried into the boat with me. I paddled up stream a bit and talked to a few paddlers. Backpaddling upstream was weird with the rudder. When they announced 5 minutes there was a bunch of paddlers downstream of the ramp sideways, a couple were still there when they started counting down from 10 seconds. I didn't really make a hard plan for my start I just wanted to get paddling. When I hit the confluence I was just rig...

  We got in the water shortly after the solos went. We hung out on the side of the Kaw until they said 3 minutes. Then we started staging for the confluence. Our original plan was to go fairly early in the pack on the left side. Since Scott talked about it at the safety meeting it was where about two thirds of the pack were headed. We went right in the center and really didn't have many boats to near us. We paddled out at what we thought was was a decent race pace. Somewhere around 55 strokes a minute. We were passing quite a few of the pack but some boats were pulling away from us pretty well. We caught up to Donald and Aaron around broadway bridge. We paddled around each other for quite awhile. We started taking our breaks right on time. I took mine at a quarter to the hour and Amber took hers on the hour. We took about a 3 minute break while eating. I drank every 15 minutes to the minute. We passed the first solo at 9:45 he was a stand up paddle board. We started passing solos p...

  Our 2016 MR340 story We got ourselves to the start just before 6AM. The day was warm and humid already but with a few clouds in the sky. We had the boat outfitted before the solo start. We went down and watched the solos and it went off without a hitch, nobody took a swim. We got on the water about 7:30 and went across the Kaw and hung out by the bank. We spent our time talking to Brian and Marilyn. When the countdown started we moved to the middle of the pack. We took the confluence a little right of center. There were some tight spots where boats almost sandwiched us in. I told Amber to dig and we pushed hard to stay out of trouble. For a girl who had been vocal about how nervous she was to get through the confluence you wouldn't know. She stayed poised and didn't concern herself looking around for trouble. We were in decent shape by the second bridge and were settled in to a quick pace. We decided we were going to race our own race but we were still able to see Brian and M...

  Our 2015 MR340 story We took off from Kaw point at 8. We took up the rear once again out of not wanting to contend with poorly controlled boats at the confluence. We still had to dodge a lot of boats and power past guys who didn't know what they were doing. We didn't See Joe and Brian ahead of us anywhere. We started passing solo boats at around 12 I think. We past Napoleon where we saw mom and asked where's joe? She said he left 4 minutes ago and Dan was on the ramp with a problem with his seat. We kept an even race pace and came past Lexington around 2:30 we were passing some boats at this point but mostly paddled around the same 5-10 boats. We pulled into waverly around 5:30 or 6 and joe was there getting geared up to pull into the river. We had both ran out of water with the checkpoint in sight. It took probably 10 minutes to get our boat cleaned out and our water freshened up and resuppliedWe headed out with Glasgow as the goal to our next stop then the sun got low a...