Our first race...

Richard and I travelled to stay Saturday night in London to be close to the start of the Frank Luzmore race.

This morning at 07:34 we got a phone call from our support team, Remko. He informed us that he wouldn't be able to support us on the Frank Luzmore due to parking his car in a tree but assured us he wasn't hurt.

He said the recovery was coming to get the car, a mate was coming to pick him up and because we couldn't help to go and race.

We went to the modified start of the FL. The Thames had dropped but was still very fast. We weren't sure if the race would still go ahead. We then go the news that the water was 25cm above the rollers, I've taken a K2 down the main drop at the Nene so what's the problem with that?

We then got the news that the race was still on but was further modified. I was starting just above Richmond Canoe Club, up past Teddington to some bridge turn around and back to RCC (at warp speed). We went down to RCC where we further assessed the river. I decided that we were not racing, the negatives out weighed the positives and the magnitude of the consequences of a swim were far to large to accept.

We went to see how Remko was. He was OK so we took him to meet the recovery truck and said goodbye to one of the GT team cars.

We made the decision that we weren't travelling this distance and like last time not being able to paddle. We headed back to the Crofton Flight to do it and head to the Bruce Tunnel.

When we got there there was some ice still in the lock cut but a lot more liquid than last visit. So we paddled. We couldn't get much past the top of the flight because it was frozen. A narrowboater had broken the ice on the middle section we paddled up from the road bridge that afternoon. We thanked him for this.

We were a bit wobbly to start with and I couldn't see a good reason why? Because the section, as those of you who have paddled the Crofton Flight will know, was quite short I got out and had a look at Richard's seating position. Before we got back in we adjusted the seat to see if there was a difference. The difference was immeasurable. This meant we were able to concentrate on going forwards rather than worrying about our wobbles! The speed we have got the boat running at is good.

The next area to be looked at was the portages. These aren't Brian Greenham out of the boat before you've actually got to the portage speeds, they weren't graceful, they weren't particularly efficient but they were faster than we were doing previously.

Because this was such a good session I decided to add another variable- raising my seat by one notch. It felt a better paddling position but has changed the centre of wobblyness. It isn't going back down. The next challenge is getting Richard up to the second notch too!

So all in all from a day that started off on quite a bad foot where everything seemed to be going wrong it actually turned into our most productive session so far:

• We improved our portages
• We were running the fastest we ever have
• We had a positive chat with a narrowboater
• We had a positive meeting with some fisher people (they had a fisher woman with them) who caught a 6.8kg (15lb) pike and actually talked in a positive way with us- just check hell hasn't frozen over!

Let's hope that we have some more thawing before Waterside A

Tom