The Annual Hong Kong Island Paddle Club
Hong Kong to Macao Paddle 2007
One of our target events, the annual HKIPC paddle to Macao and back represents a chance for paddlers relatively new to the sport to acquaint themselves with the sharper end of the stick in the paddling calendar, and offers the more experienced paddler a chance to push new barriers once again and pass hard earned knowledge of long distance paddling to others.
This year we had healthy mix of the two groups coming together. The most common perception this year from senior paddlers is how well the less experienced paddlers performed over the two days.
But let’s take a step back to May and June where it all starts. This paddle takes some organising indeed and for two or three months Agnes (she knows who she is, stand up!) has put in an absolutely tremendous contribution of work in organising the legal and administration for the event. Similarly Alex and Jo made our stay in Macao as pleasant as possible with clean rooms, clean buses and clean plates by the end of dinner, even managing to present our young Clare with a birthday cake. We are under the impression Clare would not have wanted to spend her birthday doing anything other than 72 k/m of paddling with her team for her birthday. Good on you Clare. Then there’s the litany of people who contributed in organising paddle rosters, the route for this year, emergency and medical plans, gearing up the boats and so on. They know who they are, and there’s plenty of them.
A fresh start on Saturday morning with everybody at the Victoria Recreation Club in Deepwater Bay at 6.30am. The Swiss German partnership of Claudius Spartacus and Elke, with a reputation for punctuality surprisingly had a wee lie in but other than that we were on the water and rearing to go at 8am ish.
The press were there to greet us and Sunday’s SCMP shows a photo of one of our three 6 man canoes departing. We kept one canoe for two hour iron sessions and the other two canoes changed 3 people most times at about thirty minutes giving those paddlers an hour in the seat at a time. At a high of 36 degrees this was never going to be a walk in the park and Dave Steel led the way with hydration issues, a curse he lives with in the extreme heat. A courageous effort of Dave’s for working through it to the end.
We skirted south of Hong Kong’s islands avoiding crossing the busy Macao ferry route this year. It made a lot of sense and we passed Hong Kong, Chinese and Macanese islands. Not bad for a day’s paddling. Most people managed a good look at the rare pink dolphins of the South China Sea. Not having a doctor on board, we managed to rustle up Emily, a Jockey Club vet who specialises in horses. Emily noted these dolphins are pink because their blood vessels are closer to the skin than other dolphins in order for the little fellas to release heat easier through their skin. And if anybody needs a horse tranquilizer please line up behind the others. On a few occasions these dolphins came close to the canoes with one making a spectacular jump and fish-tailing on top of the water. Not sure if anybody but Pussy observed this. Perhaps the others were busy paddling Pus.
We arrived to Macao after 7 hours and fifty-one minutes of hard paddling and swift sea changes only to have immigration set a record for customs clearance. Two and a half hours later we were at the hotel with a 15 minute turn around for the bus to dinner. Then we had to find the bus driver. We had volunteers to drive the bus as bus man kindly left the keys in the ignition, however the air brakes were difficult to find and the thing kept stalling so we opted to behave ourselves and let bus man drive us once he was ready.
Dinner and birthday cake in the midst of a major electrical storm that cut the electricity for the better part of an hour in Taipa made us think the ensuing day’s activities would not be in flat seas but it was a flash storm and the next day seemed terrifyingly hotter and calmer than Saturday. Given that we were all sore from Saturday this was looking like a long day ahead of us. We launched only two canoes Sunday as some paddlers left to go back to Hong Kong by ferry for family commitments and Summi (barf award goes to Summi with spectacular round house on support boat followed close 2nd from Teena with persistent efforts in canoe) and Alex with work commitments on Saturday joined us for the Sunday paddle.
There was a record number of 7 slips on the treacherous ramp that leads to the water where we berthed the canoes in Macao. Fortunately while they were entertaining slips in a rather perverse way, there were no broken bones although we suspect our Matt Flynn will be feeling a touch sore today. Super back flip Matt.
This time we couldn’t help ourselves. The message going out was ”its not a race” as we split the group evenly into two crews. But that’s like putting sugar to ants and within an hour all hell broke loose trying to sort out timing of changes, strategic boat loading, deviations off the straight line home to gain any advantage we could. To see both boats come into Deepwater Bay within a few minutes of each other is testament to the determination of both crews. We took a whopping 1 hour and 6 minutes off the previous days run. We should be proud of that achievement. Well done us and here’s to a hugely successful paddle to Macao 2007.
Photos by Henning Wiekhorst, copyright 2007
