| Summary | Watching the fireworks from canoes and packrafts! |
| Owner | Matthew Gilbertson |
| Creation Date | 2012-07-05 23:26:13 UTC-0400 |
| Description | “Paddling & Pyrotechnics on Charles river, for the 4th of July” Ben was announcing on the website. When I read that, I immediately got excited and had to smile - that sounded like an immense amount of fun! And it was!
We got started at 7PM at the MITOC boathouse, grabbing all floatable devices we could find. I guess MinWah was the most hardcore paddler with nothing but a surf board and a paddle (or something similar to a paddle). Of course the pack-rafter were “on-board”. Hai had just completed (or shall I say, fortunately survived) his first pack-raft trip on June circus and obviously got pack-raft-addicted. After getting the boats ready for transportation we started making our way to Charles river on Massachussetts Avenue. It feels unfamiliar to roll boats in the middle of a road which is usually quite busy. We arrived at Charles river at 8:30 PM and were relieved about the weather. It was still warm and more importantly there wasn’t any thunderstorm yet. The forecast announced scattered thunderstorms until 9 PM. That meant there was a good chance we were lucky to escape any lightning. The boats were launched into the water quickly and we could get started. Some groups may have went through a short teambuilding process, in order to paddle straight forward ;). After finally having this figured out and enjoying this special night on the river, the lightning – we had hoped to escape – did appear. So we chose the fastest way to getting out of the water again, which was the MIT boathouse. But we hadn’t made the decision with the “I’m an MIT boathouse-instructor and I’m gonna call the police if you get out here” woman. So we didn’t have any other chance but getting to the spot where we entered. There was another group of us further ahead. We found out later, they stayed underneath the Harvard bridge and as Matthews photo show, obviously had some fun down there. I instantly hoped we could get into the water one more time and joined the smartphone people checking for the forecast. The radar showed some rain clouds and since we couldn’t be sure, we decided to take some time for Frisbee on Memorial drive. After a while, the weather was still stable. Ben made some safety announcements which included to ignore the furious boathouse instructor and we agreed to go on our own risks, when we finally made it back into the water. It turned out, that was perfect timing! We made it right in front of the barge, set the anchor, when 5 min later the fireworks started. That was just an incredible experience! Also the weather had the perfect timing. About 5 min after the fireworks, an enormous shower started. In our group no one cared about it, everyone was just super happy. We met the other group back on the shore where Erika was telling about her paddling incident. She obviously had some trouble when her packraft started deflating in the middle of the river! Luckily she managed to reach the others and didn’t sink. All smiling MITOCs made it back to the boathouse, where we finished with cleaning up at around midnight. Big thanks again to Ben for organizing the trip & I know, whenever I come back to the US for Independence day, it will be super hard to ever top it ;). -Nadine |