Water on the Brain

The wind was down and the sky was filled with light overcast. My daughter and I headed out to Chestermere Lake with our paddle boards and launched them. It was wonderful.

The swim area pictured above is where we wanted to launch from on a previous trip a couple weeks back, but we discovered that the area was off-limits to inflatables and other watercraft, not that the dude in the kayak is paying attention to the signs. Doh. On top of that the wind was off the hook. There was no boarding that night.

I used my electric pump to inflate our boards this evening and then attached my kayak seat and foot rest to my own board, shown above. I have had balance issues since an injury in my early twenties, so I use my paddle board as a kayak rather than standing on it. My balance isn’t so hot with the inner ear problems I was left with.

It was 19C out, not too hot and not too cool. There was practically no breeze at all leaving the water very calm, but not quite mirror-like. Even the mosquitoes weren’t too bad. The only thing that was less than perfect was the camera I used for the evening.

The Fujifilm Finepix XP-20 is just not a great camera. It wasn’t good when it was new and it is even less so now. I couldn’t even adjust the exposure compensation for my shots as that button is apparently broken. I pride myself on being able to produce a useable picture with just about any camera. This one made it a real fight.

I don’t want to take my cell phone camera out on the lake and use that; this lake has a habit of eating my cameras and expensive ones at that. I’m going to have to look into cheaper options for a replacement.

Still, after a week of setbacks and letdowns it was nice to be on the lake again. I’m looking forward to much more of it this summer.

The pics of the paddle board on land are from my Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra. So are the bottom two dusk images. The rest of the photos came from the craptastic Fujifilm Finepix XP-20.