Cambridge to Hamilton Kayak Race

I headed down to Cambridge for the annual Cambridge to Hamilton kayak race. Russell from Canoe and Kayak gave me a ride to the start and we all mulled around the start of the race for the race briefing. Because there were so many kayaks of differnt speeds, the race started in waves every 5 minutes, and I was in the Multisport/K1 wave, starting 2nd to last. I got in early and made my way over to a vacant bank to wait for the start. I was joined by a south african lady in a k1 who was a little twitchy on the water. About 5 minutes later a double kayak, saw our calm resting spot and decidied to come over. They clearly had never kayaked in a double before and the woman at the back had no idea what she was doing, as evident from the slapping of the water with both sides of the paddle. Sure enough, they attempted to swing around and totally miscalculated it and run there steel rudder along my kayak and despite my protestations of telling them to go forward, they put a 2m long scratch on my kayak. And not a word of apology, just a panicked look. But worse was to come. They then run their rudder along the Ladys boat despite 3 people now shouting at them to go forward. But what do they do? They reverse! Absolute idiots. Now they reverse with such force that they smash into the lady's rudder and the two medal rudders lock together. The stupid woman stupidly tries to pull the kayaker closer, and only succeeds in making her tippier than ever, and she is now screaming at them to stop. We tried to tell the lady to move to a 90degree angle so another guy could untagle the rudder. After some scrambing and a few freocious tugs it came free. The double kayak was free and kayaked off to the start, not even apologizing once for the absolute mahem they caused. And left the 3 of our boats there cursing there inept skills. It was probably a classic case of a man dragging his unprepared wife along on a double. I'm not sure which of them was dumber. All i know was that i had a totally unecessary scratch on my new kayak, and some poor woman had to complete the race with a bent (and possibly broken) rudder thanks to them.
I learnt a lesson I guess, and that is that Kayakers are some of the biggest dangers on the river, not just rocks and moving water.

As for my race it was mostly without much incident apart from a tight section about half way through the race. There was a canadian canoe full of scouts that I had follwed for a few minutes looking for a place to pass. I found a spot and overtook them, but then there were some large boils just after I passed them that I had to slow down to negotiate. I was fine for the first two and then I felt my boat turning to the right uncontrolably. I was soon to discover to my horror than the canadian canoe had run me down and its bow was now sitting on the back of my kayak and my bow was now raised out of the water and I was travelling down the river backwards with my tail buring under water. The scout leader asked me if i could get out from under his boat, and I replied that i would obviously do that if i could, but I was pinned. I dont think he understood. Meanwhile we were slowly drifting towards the bank and the trees. I got hid in the head by a branch and shouted at them to paddle sideways to get out of the danger. There was no response from their inexperienced scouts so I decided to save myself while they sat there. I wresteled the boat inch by inch and managed to get the tail free from under there boat, grabbed my own paddle and paddled out the back and back up the river. At least they apologized. The sad irony was that they were only going half way, and 2 minutes later they pulled over to stop anyway. I was furious.
Since then I have wondered whether this was my fault or theirs. My passing manouver was fine, and maybe my pause around the boils caused the accident, but they clearly did nothing to avoid running me down and certainly did nothing to help me free. Again the same lessons. Kayakers are the major danger in a race.

More lessons learned and the remainder of the paddle was uneventful and I came down to the end and finished up with a time of 1:54:23 finishing 119th of 243 finishers. I had lost the 'tired arms' sydrome and it just felt like a good workout.