Outrigger Races

Sunday 18th January 2009
It rained this morning, it cleared the air a bit but we are going to need a lot more of it to cool the air down and give us a couple of days off from watering the garden.
We went to the market this morning before going for a coffee on the foreshore, while we sat and savoured the moment, the kids went into the Nautical Lady (an amusement type place) where Fraser and Marisa got to go on the water slide for an hour while Kristian opted for having little goes on everything else, they all had a great time.
While they were doing that, we kept our eye on the Outrigger Races that were taking place round the Jetty. These Outriggers are pretty much the same as the ones you used to see at the start of Hawaii Five-O and are rowed by teams of amateurs.
These teams must be seriously fit, the race that we were keeping an eye on was a 10km race and the winning team, who were paddling at a fair pace all the way round, took about an hour to complete the course, the team that came last was about twenty minutes behind them. As we left, the next race had just started, it was an 8km ladies race, they didn’t look like a load of athletes or Russian weight lifters so we hate to think how long it would have taken them to finish although all these Outrigger Teams do it for fun, they must be crackers.
We had a pretty dossy rest of the day really, just chilling out and watching the world go by.