Canoe Craziness!!!!

Okay... So in the name of being a "good mom", or perhaps in the quest to be a fun Girl Scout Leader, or maybe just due to temporary insanity, I attended a week-long Canoe Clinic with Megan and several of the girls in my Girl Scout troop. The pictures below are from the second-to-last day, where we took the canoes to the nearby YMCA pool to practice swamping and rescuing canoes. The reason there are no pics of me or Megan is because my partner and I were practicing with Megan and her partner. But just realize that we (ahem, I) did the same thing!


When a canoe is "swamped", or flipped and filled with water, it must be rescued by another canoe. So, first, the rescuing canoe musct get perpendicular to the swamped canoe, and work to turn it over to empty the water from it.
As the canoe is being turned over, it must be lifted onto the rescuing canoe. It is heavy! (The girls from the "swamped" canoe are at each end of the rescuing canoe to keep it from flipping. Hopefully)
Then, the canoe has to be flipped back over before it can be launched back into the water.
It is amazing how much teamwork it takes to do this. Today is the day I realized the reason girls have to be in 7th grade before they can be in the canoe race.
After getting the canoe back in the water, the rescuing canoe gets parallel with the canoe to be rescued, and then has to help the girls back in. The canoe gets tipped over so the girls can get their hands in the bottom for leverage...
Then as the rescuing canoe is pushed back to it's normal position, the girls *should* be hoisted into the canoe. Today we learned that it doesn't matter how you get in, as long as you get in~ There is no such thing as gracefully getting into the canoe!

If this week didn't get me points toward the "Mom of the Year" Award, I don't know what will!

I was trying so hard to get out of doing this particular day of the training, but I was told that if I didn't learn how to rescue canoes, I would not be able to take my troop out without another trainer.
It was a good thing I did, because the next day, while taking a canoe trip down the river, another canoe collided with Megan's canoe, and TIPPED it! The lifeguard in the "rescue" canoe jumped out without realizing that we needed him in the canoe, so MY canoe became the rescue canoe! (Now is the time that I should mention that the lady in my canoe, Christine, had never been in a canoe before.- But she was a trooper, and did an awesome job!) After rescuing Megan and Jondalynn, we had to rescue the lifeguard! Fun times...