Extreme Kayaking, Or How I Almost Drowned The Wedding Date
If you don’t know what extreme kayaking is, let me say right now: I pity you. Obviously you don’t come from a family where activities such as drunken mini golf and competitive eating at Philip’s all-you-can-eat seafood buffet constitute acceptable Memorial Day activities.
It all began several years ago when my brother teamed up with a pair of fellow weekenders on Hooper’s Island and decided that regular kayaking was boring. Or maybe they were just lazy and decided regular kayaking required to much physical exertion. Either way, they tied a kayak to a rowboat, affixed an engine to the rowboat and set off down the Honga River where the cruised along at an impressive… oh, I don’t know, 5 mph?
At any rate, EXTREME KAYAKING was born, and despite being related to the inventor of said sport, I’ve never felt the need to partake before.
This is because extreme kayaking involves a fair amount of arguing.
And capsizing.
But then I got a boyfriend. And said boyfriend was foolish enough to accept my invitation to spend Memorial Day weekend at Hoopers Island with my parents, my brother, a family friend from Baltimore, and a trio of kayaks.
The weekend began with the annual Richter family pilgrimage to Phillips in Ocean City where the men folk tried to out-eat each other and the more refined amongst us focused our efforts on devouring the Alaskan king crab legs.
After gorging ourselves on hush puppies and fried clams, we headed to the golf course. The following sign would suggest that we were hardly the first party to pre-game but I’m pretty sure we were the only people who brought our drinks right along with us.
(Actually scratch that. My dad took a picture of the sign of his cell phone because my Droid sucks but he hasn’t sent it to me yet because he has no respect for my blog so you’ll just have to take my word on this one: it was funny.)
On Sunday, my brother finally succeeded on convincing us to join him for a morning of extreme kayaking. At least he convinced me; The Wedding Date was another story.
“You should probably leave your cell phone in the house,” I warned as we headed out to the dock.
“Why?”
“You don’t want it to get wet.”
“It won’t.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’m not going.”
“What do you mean you’re not going?”
This was unacceptable.
I used my feminine wiles to convince to go back into the house, deposit his cell phone and change into his swim trunks. But he wasn’t happy about it.
“Come on,” I urged. “It’ll be fun. We can do lifts like in Dirty Dancin.”
“They were in the water and they couldn’t even do it. You want to do lifts in a boat? A boat that’s moving?”
“Yeah!” (What can I say? I’ve always been pretty sure the laws of physics don’t apply to me.)
“Fine,” he replied. “I’ll come. I just don’t want to get wet.”
“We won’t,” I assured him. “My brother does this all the time.”
So we piled into the kayak, my brother and our friend piled into the rowboat and off we went.
We zoomed along, as extreme as the most extreme of roller coasters, and everything was going well for about… well… 30 seconds. It was them that my brother decided to do a turn and the kayak didn’t quite comply. It plunged into the water and started to sink, with The Wedding Date and me still inside.
I like to think that I jumped out in a graceful, death defying sort of way but really I rolled out and started splashing around because I was convinced TWD had gotten stuck inside and was probably drowning at that very moment and it would be all my fault because he hadn’t even wanted to come extreme kayaking in the first place.
Long story short, The Wedding Date did not drown. Instead, he turned to me and said, “I have three words for you: Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones the GAME.” (Aka the bane of my existence.)
And this is why extreme kayaking should probably be illegal.
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Kat Echevarría Richter 
3 Responses to “Extreme Kayaking, Or How I Almost Drowned The Wedding Date”
So…this story would be even better if we had the photos (Ahem…Chauffer) to prove to your fans that there were some extremely artistic things happening during extreme kayaking. From the Baroque arm movements, the jazz hands, the imitation water ballet intensity, and your total extreme standing poses – it WAS pretty amazing! (Says she who directed from the safety of the front of the row boat…) I will be a willing participant in extreme kayaking whenever you want… (And I have already begun collecting outfit items for Round Two of mini golf….)
YES! I need to start procuring an outfit as well. Hmm…this has hat possibilities written all over it! Send Kat the darn photos, chauffeur!!!
Photo, photo! 🙂