Toronto Island weekend.

My car is out of commission so Eve picked me up at 6am and we headed to the Boulie to meet Ian and a few of the other coaches. So great - Ian had offered motorboat rides so we didn't have to deal with the gong show at the ferry terminal.

There were 8 of us so we took the whaler (Ian, Conor, Eve, Chelsea and me) and Steve took the zodiac with Konrad and Del.

As we were leaving, Ian pointed towards the Palais and said, " Wtf, there're people on the breakwall". Mostly he just noticed them because they had the 10-man dboat pulled into the breakwall with them. Clearly they'd untied it from it's mooring and used it to ferry themselves across the gap. It was a group of 20-something's partying on in their underwear. As we approached Ian said he'd slow down enough so Conor could grab the end of the boat and we'd keep going. We pulled up and Ian said, "What - are you retarded? You can't just steal a boat".

They were so proudly self-conscious of their obvious hip factor; up partying all night, in their underwear, watching the sunrise from the breakwall. Hell, that's just a weekday morning for a paddler and they seemed disappointed that we weren't more reactive to the nudity.

One girl in particular got cranky about us taking the boat after Ian said they could swim back. As we tied it back to it's offshore mooring one of the guys, let's call him "Drum Circle", started swimming back. After a couple of strokes he realized he could just stand up and encouraged the rest to follow. Crank Grrl whined over and over that she couldn't swim so Ian offered to call the Marine Unit to pick them up. She said yes, do that but Drum Circle knew he wasn't referring to a taxi service and said don't bother.

We left them to it. Ian called the lifeguards, Evan and Robert, asking them to check on the 10-man when they got down to Sunnyside since we were fairly certain they'd just untie it again. They did and the guys found the boat up on the rocks behind the Palais.

Seriously, private motorboat is the only way to travel to this festival. I'm spoiled for the ferry now. When we got over there, we had a tent, chair, tarps, all of our gear, everything we would need to survive 2 days on the Island. This was especially good since they had forecast massive thunderstorms for the entire day on Saturday.

Day one was beautiful and sunny and, as much as I was dreading this weekend, with the communting/parking/ferry stress removed it was actually awesome! I got to hang out with some friends I don't get to see nearly often enough, took care of my own crews and helped out with others and got to know my paddlers a little better.

Dave was really entertaining when it came to the ridiculous starter. They don't like to use CCA officials so they just get one of their friends to do it. She gave Dave a time penalty early in the day - maybe even first race - and he was not impressed. And it wasn't even a real time penalty - it was something like .5 of a second.

Eve's brother was there with a vistor from Taiwan. Adward was pretty cool about hanging around the Island all day but I have to say, it wasn't the most difficult thing. Especially since he's a photog. Lots of material there.

Day two and I slept through my alarm. Wow - I haven't slept through the night in weeks and the one day someone is coming to pick me up at 6AM I sleep until 5:58. Fortunately, I hadn't unpacked my bag from the day before. I just had to throw on some clothes and brush my teeth! Still, it meant wearing nasty racing jerseys worn the day before.

As we got to the Boulie we saw that zodiac going past the sailing club. As it turned out, Ian was waiting for us to get there and had given Steve and the guys the other boat. After we remembered that Del was going to paddle across with Pete, we packed up our gear and left. We caught up with the other boat just around the pretend ferry that goes to the Island airport.