Davy Crockett Canoes

LARD’s incoming captain, Tabitha, organized a Disneyland trip last weekend.  Despite the threat of rain, 13 of us headed out to Disneyland to paddle the Davy Crockett canoes.

On our first lap, they put us on the boat with a few non-paddlers.  It was probably a bit intimidating for them.  Billy and Jesse decided they’d sit seat 1 for that lap.  Jesse sits in seat 10 next to me in races. I don’t recall Billy ever sitting in seat 1 (but I could be mistaken).  They decided to set a blistering 200m-like rate for most of the way around the island (700m+ all the way around).  Needless to say, Tabitha and Kat would be sitting seat 1 for our next lap.  The non-paddlers struggled to keep up – one even profusely apologizing from splashing the crap out of James’ backpack.

The steersmen (one at the front and one at the back) were pretty excited that we knew how to paddle.  Our first lap wasn’t all that eventful as we kept catching up to the Mark Twain boat (larger white ship with a giant wheel behind it) and having to promptly stop.  For our second lap, Vi volunteered to record the lap on my camera.  The Disney cast members wanted us to paddle with their best steersman.  So we waited for his boat to come back around the island (there were about 3 canoes on the water) and we waited some more so the ships and other canoes cleared out of our way.

As we were waiting, word spread that they had some dragon boat paddlers that wanted to see how quickly we could get around the island.  We were told the record around the island was 3:53 set by an all mens crew.  We had a hodge-podge mix of LARD paddlers – Black, Red and White were all represented – 5 women and 7 men.  We were lucky to have Steve from Space on the boat as well.  It was fun paddling with you Steve!

We finished the piece at 3:59 – 6 seconds from the Disney men’s fastest time but probably the fastest mixed time to date.  The front “steersman” didn’t do too much to help our cause – I distinctly remember the steersman seated directly behind me yelling at the guy in the front to help out but from the video, he looked pretty content holding his paddle in his hands.

After our lap, we left the canoe, returned our paddles and headed up the ramp.  To my surprise, the back steersman, came up the ramp with us and began to chat us up about our lap and paddling in general.  A cool guy and a great time.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to put together a crew again in the near future and do it again.