Rescue at Sea

Calling the lagoons at Carburn Park the sea is a bit of a stretch, but you get the idea… More on the rescue in a moment. I finally got back to Carburn Park with The Missus as it is a pleasant place to paddle around and I thought she would like it. I also wanted to bring my daughter, but she ditched on us. Punk.

The park was filling up quickly when we arrived around 10:45 am and the best parking spots were already taken. This made pumping up the boards feel a bit cramped as we inflated them between parked vehicles.

We were on the lake twenty-odd minutes later and my wife got to try out the new kayak seat I bought her. It, like mine, is actually a fold up stadium seat meant to be used on a bench at a stadium at sporting events. It is built better than the average kayak seat at half the price. She was much happier with the new seat, which made the trip a resounding success for us.

You can see the back of the new seat in the above image. It, like mine, has a hard handle in the middle of where the seat folds. It can poke into your back, or butt, as it were. A chunk of pool noodle placed over the handle fixes that problem.

There was some minor drama followed by a feel-good moment when Jennifer spotted something flailing around on the water. It turned out that a monster dragonfly had misjudged when trying to pick an insect off the water and landed in the drink itself. The suction of the water against the insect prevented it from taking off again and it was panicked, trying not to drown.

She carefully used the end of her kayak paddle to scoop the poor thing out of the water and placed it on the end of her paddle boad, where it vibrated its wings for about twenty minutes to dry itself off. I managed to get some pictures while it was doing this. It flew off after like nothing had happened. We love dragonflies as they are beneficial insects, so it was nice to be able to save that one.

We had some fun with people watching. Three siblings were sharing one inflatable paddle board. You’d see two sisters on one round and then five minutes later you’d see a sister and a brother. The sister who paddled seemed to be the only one who knew how to paddle properly so she never changed, but the other two swapped out regularly.

There was also an Asian family (my guess would be Korean) with a mom and dad and two adorable kids. I would say the boy was about six and the girl maybe five. They started out with all four in their long kayak and then mom and dad would swap out as the other took a break. The kids did their best to help with paddling, but it looked more like they were slowing things down than anything else. It was cute as heck.

The outing was more about spending time with my wife and enjoying being on the water, but I did try to play with my camera to get some “fine art” images. That meant I spent a moment playing with reflections before losing interest and picking up my paddle again. We spent about an hour and a half on the water and went a leisurely 3.6 km before deciding the sun was getting a bit too toasty, so we packed it in.

We finished our outing at Boogie’s Burgers in Calgary. We prefer the Renfrew location, which is not only more eclectic, but actually has some parking available unlike their Marda Loop location. No one sane shops in Marda Loop these days.

Jennifer had their classic cheeseburger while I had The Boog Mak. The latter is a Big Mac ripoff other than it has tomatoes in it for some inexplicable reason. I hadn’t read the menu closely enough or I would have had them hold those. Big Macs don’t come with termaters, damn it. It was decent enough otherwise. Boog’s fries are excellent, but too large. We could have made do with a single order for both of us.

The shakes are called “No More Bad Days” and are pineapple, mango, and lime. They taste great and have real fruit in them, but they are nowhere near thick enough. We generally prefer Boog’s to Peter’s Drive-in, but Peter’s gets a nod for their shakes being thicker.

It was a pleasant morning and afternoon followed by an outstanding fast food nap. You can’t do better than that.

The images at the park were made using my OM System (Olympus!) Tough TG-7. The images from Boog’s were made with my phone.