A funny thing happened a little while back… I asked my paddling buddy Sean Morley (yes, he lives here now) to drop by and do his slide show of paddling solo around the UK and Ireland.
So he said sure, and I started planning a big couple of days with the slide show on a Friday night and a group paddle/clinic on Saturday. At the last minute I decided to get a rough idea of how many people might be coming and I got too many responses to fit into the store. Well, that left me with only one option in Redding… I would have to rent the Cascade Theater and this is not a small place. So then I started freaking out and was afraid that not enough people would come, so we printed out some posters and posted them in every coffee shop in town. This was my first mistake.Later that week, on Friday night, we opened the doors and prayed. People started coming and they didn’t stop! Sean was running a bit late and called my cell phone, that’s when I told him it was going to be big. He just didn’t know HOW BIG. When Sean showed up he just about had a heart attack, we were up to 387 and still selling tickets. We packed the theater, did a wonderful song and dance and invited all the paddlers to the clinic the next day. That was my second mistake.
Saturday morning at 7:AM Sean, Myself and a few of our better paddlers decided to do an Up-River paddle, just so we could show off our skills in 15,000cfs in Sea Kayaks. Yep, everyone is still talking about that day. We finished with grins pasted on our faces and stomachs hurting from laughing too much. After the paddle, we took off and drove 90 miles an hour to get up to the lake by 10:AM for the clinic and whoops, mistake number three.
The pictures don’t do justice to what exactly happened. We started by counting paddlers on the water and we both lost count everytime we tried. We ended up with somewhere around 70 something kayaks on the water. Sean just started laughing and Gina, his then bride to be, decided to stay in the car. Sean just kept laughing and said, it’s all yours buddy! So as you can see by the photo, I am trying to teach a herd of paddlers and Sean is still laughing at me. He is next to the lady at my right. He said we had more kayaks on the water than he ever saw in the UK!
Oh yea, as we always say here in the States, GO BIG OR GO HOME!
Captain Penguin