FFC is on her way to the coast. As of 10pm at the Palmetto checkpoint, team paddlefish was doing great and banking hours!! Here is a photo from the Staples portage.

Team Paddlefish in full force at race registration. Spirits are high — and according to race officials so is the water on the lower Guadalupe near the coast. The race will start but they will monitor flooding in South Texas. In the meantime it was a great day with family, friends and fellow racers.

having breakfast tacos with the chick while learning how to blog – the professor

Still gun-shy from last month’s race delay, I don’t want to jinx anything but it seems the Texas Water Safari is actually going to start tomorrow, July 10th at 9am.

Ah! Can you believe it is finally time??

I am signing off from the blog until the race is done and I am back in Austin convalescing with queso and red wine for breakfast in bed next Thursday. But don’t feel abandoned…there will be a whole Team Paddlefish crew of people and some fancy gadgets to keep you informed as this wild and wacky adventure unfolds. Here are some ways to follow us down the river from your computer…

While we can’t have any 2-way communication, we can have a SPOT Tracker which uploads satellite data every few minutes to detail our whereabouts. This is the Team Paddlefish SPOT Tracker page where you will be able to pinpoint our location along the race route. Obviously this will only be interesting starting Saturday morning at 9am. Until then it’s just us running errands.

After a quick ‘Digital Social Media 101’ course that I will be teaching over breakfast tacos this morning, my dad and the Professor will be armed with passwords and ready to keep yall in the know…

My dad will be doing periodic updates on the Team Paddlefish facebook page as well as the Fly Fish Chick facebook page. Not that I am a control freak or over-managing my team (ahem), but I have requested – for yall’s benefit – that he post different pictures on the two facebook pages so not to be duplicative. You don’t have to join facebook to view the updates on those pages, just click the links and see if he has any progress or pictures to report. Simple as pie.

Meanwhile the Professor will be doing posts to the blog here at FFC as well as periodic updates on The Fly Fish Chick TWITTER. Again, you don’t have to join twitter to see the updates on that link.

And finally, since we’re all river gauge junkies I thought some of you might be interested in the checking in on the CFS for various spots along the race route. If so here is the USGS table for TX. Scroll down to Guadalupe River Basin. Points of interest along the race are: San Marcos at Luling, Guadalupe at Gonzales, Guadalupe at Cuero, Guadalupe at Victoria (which as you can see is currently a high water point) Guadalupe at Tivoli upstream of Saltwater Barrier. The concern with all that high water near the coast is that we lose gradient, the water spreads out, and we lose our way as no linear paths become clear.

But we’ll deal with that in a few days.

In the meantime THANK YOU all so much for getting me to this point. I literally wouldn’t have been able to survive the past year without your enthusiasm and kind messages and unwavering friendship and constant cheerleading and boundless generosity. Truly, I feel very blessed to have shared this journey with each of you and am off to make you proud…

Cheers  & Love….catch you on the flipside. ~FFC

It’s been an interesting and chaotic few weeks. I am writing to you on my phone from the minneapolis airport so bear with me as I share the cliff note version of the recent roller coaster.

Fifteen days ago we were geared up and ready for the texas water safari to take off. My dining room was buried in supplies and Clif Shot Bloks, we had a lot to do but were chomping at the bit to get the race underway

Unfortunately Mother Nature blocked our shot.

Extreme flash floods spiked on the Guadalupe River forcing the water safari board to postpone the race which has only happened two other times in the 47 year history of the race. The race was delayed one month, the new start date: July 10th

Trigger chaos mode. That is the day Little Chick gets out of camp. What to do about family travel schedules. My three week fishing trip in montana was blown to bits including my girls trip and the Professor’s MT birthday celebration

But the news got worse. Tosh had a major family trip planned in July and would not be able to serve as team captain– a critical and difficult role

That’s not all…

Banning announced he has a work trip conflict in july and would not be able to race

Devastating.

I promptly began eating my way through the race snack food that was piled on the dining room floor. Let’s just say there are significantly fewer Clif cookies and cream body builder bars than there were two weeks ago.

By the way, the margarita flavored Clif shot bloks do not ease pain the same way ‘traditional rocks no salt’ gets the job done

I will spare you the agonizing detail of the emotional roller coaster but I will tell you I became borderline crazed in my determination to get back in this race.

Long long long story short…a miracle happened and I was able to find another race partner.

Phil Meyer is an experienced whitewater paddler and racer who has done the Safari and for reasons unknown to me that we are no longer going to question for fear he might wise up…he has agreed to take me on as a partner despite my true novice capabilities.

Phil wasn’t interested in paddling the aluminum beast so I am madly learning to paddle a carbon tandem safari race boat. Yikes! It’s pretty fun–i actually get to steer with a rudder.

While I am trying to up my paddling skills (hello draw stroke which needs work) Phil is madly patching up the boat and getting the rudder system tweaked.

We have two+ weeks to train, put together the boat, the gear and get Team Paddlefish v 2.0 to the starting line. We have been hard at work for over a week.

And now? Furlow. Sanity. Recharge. I am headed to MT for 3 days of fishing before we start to seal a meal our clif bars and apply Desitin to our nether regions

Hope everyone is having a great summer! Cheers for now…

Mack Brown played football for Vanderbilt in 1970 when I arrived on the scene in Nashville, TN – as a newborn.

Much later as a college freshman in 1989, I arrived in Chapel Hill just one year after Mack Brown took over as head coach there for the Tarheels.

In 2000, I was two years behind Mack when I followed him to Austin.

And now, in 2010, I am a mere 22-pages behind him in the June issue of Tribeza Magazine.

Mack and his wife are on the cover of Tribeza’s June Outdoor & Sports issue, while yours truly has a little blurb in the EXPOSED section.

Many thanks to my dear friend and freelance writer Sarah Wittenbraker who wrote the piece with grace and humor. Much gratitude to editor Lauren Smith Ford for taking an interest in my quest for the Texas Water Safari, I’m honored she selected me for this month’s EXPOSED article. Special nod to Dylan who just happened to be the guy at Tribeza to answer my random phone calls, was incredibly helpful, and consequently is my new on-the-ground contact best friend over there. And finally, I can’t say enough about photographer Jay B Sauceda who made the photoshoot very laidback and easy breezy.

Check out Sauceda’s very cool site with images of small town painted signs (some of which are on the TWS race route to boot!) and some delicious photos of dive bars such as Ginny’s Little Longhorn. Be still my heart…

And to bring the whole thing full circle? This photog is no stranger to the flyrod. Here’s a great shot of him in West Yellowstone last year:

Many Thanks to the entire Tribeza team for putting together a red hot issue that features people getting active and getting out in it.

And PS…Hey Mack, what’s next for us compadre? Where do we go from here?

Go Heels. Hook ‘Em Horns. Go Team Paddlefish.

Meet my new best friend and sidekick, Fitty.

No not that Fitty, this one:

“Fitty” is a piece of luggage loaded with books and hand weights so it weighs exactly fifty pounds. And for the next couple of weeks I am going to be hauling it back and forth around my house to train for the race.

Once we load the aluminum beast with all our gear, we estimate it will weigh at least 100 pounds. In order to prepare to portage dams and logjams – not to mention carry the canoe to the starting line – we figure we should each get use to carrying the weight of fifty pounds.

I’m gonna be cut like Fitty.

I was going to load it with weights but decided to save the extra coin and use books instead – after all, there is a book deal at the end of this odyssey so it seemed practically poetic.

So what books are in there? I handpicked a few choice titles that capture the spirit of the cause…

The Last Girls by Lee Smith (A book about a river adventure on the Mississippi that I was re-reading last year when this whole idea of racing in the Water Safari sprung to life)

Undaunted Courage by Stephen Ambrose. Think the title speaks for itself in this situation.

Borderland by Bud Shrake (I read this tale about the Texas Revolution and the settling of Austin when I moved back to Texas ten years ago…seems relevant as I embark on a Texas-size adventure right through the heart of Texas)

Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling. Coming of age story about a girl in Montana who is an underdog and an outsider

Souls Raised From The Dead by Doris Betts, my college writing professor. She was working on this novel when I was studying with her my senior year, I’ve always felt a connection to it.

Get Fit Or Die Tryin….In Da Book Club.

Since I haven’t posted in awhile I thought I would cover a good bit of ground by bringing back the Triple Entendre. This post we’re looking at various meanings for the phrase Run Off.

RUN OFF – As in Run Off and Join The Witness Protection Program or Maybe Even The Circus

So if you’ve been around FFC for awhile you know I tend to disappear in the month of May. End of school brings a frenzy of activities, PTA forms, field trips, tests, sleepovers, camp prep, track and field, computer pageants, etc etc. I’ve said it before and I will say it again, May is the new December. Throw in a broken computer and car repairs and I am ripe for a nervous breakdown.

Of course this May has been extra dense with action. Mother’s Day Weekend I did a presentation at Sportsmans Finest flyshop here in Austin. It was a treat to break from training and errands and work and spend half a day talking with fellow anglers about fishing in Montana. Here I am with my mom who was visiting, Little Chick, and good friend Ted from Sportsmans:

And of course I’ve been just a wee bit busy preparing for this little race…The Texas Water Safari. You may have heard of it. It’s less than THREE WEEKS AWAY!! Can you believe it? I apologize if any of you have emailed me in the past few months and I haven’t replied, I am literally at capacity. I really did have a mini nervous breakdown last weekend trying to figure out how to get everything accomplished and considered running off to join the circus or the witness protection program.

(Then again maybe I’m already in the witness protection program and this whole Fly Fish Chick gig is my cover.)

At any rate, there was no time for a mental health breakdown and frankly my todo list couldn’t handle picking a circus or contacting the FBI for witness protection, much less dream up a mafia crime I would have witnessed, so I decided to put my head down and plow through it.

Last week was another milestone for Team Paddelfish. We did a three-day training run. 45 miles the first day, 38 the next, and 26 on the third. All in all it went well, though the 26 miles was definitely on the hardest part of the race route. Lots of twists and turns and rapids and branches to dodge. But we did it, 3 days. Now can we do 262 in 100 hours?

Here’s a picture of Banning – I sort of left him hanging in the middle of portaging this dam because I had to snap this photo:

And here’s our streamside boat repair. I was in charge of bringing the duct tape…as you can probably surmise, I borrowed some from Little Chick.

RUN OFF – As in Run Off the Treadmill and Almost Break My Neck

I am not a runner. I am simply not built for it. And I really do not enjoy it. Frankly I abhor it.

When we decided to do this race last June, we were talking about all the training that would be required. Banning suggested we’d have to be able to run three or four miles. Ha! I about fell off my chair. I could barely run three songs on the ipod. Literally, I could run one mile and I did it slower than I could walk it. (I am an oddly fast walker, who knows why?) I can do two hours on the rowing machine… I am going to paddle 262 miles…but I cringe at the idea of running one mile.

Well, as of this morning I can run three miles. I still despise it. But I can do it. I’m not fast at it. But I can do it.

I think I’ve been able to get from one mile to three miles in the last few weeks because I’ve had so much on my mind to distract me. Today I was about 2.5 miles into my 3-mile run and I was completely consumed with thoughts of my todo list: getting race numbers for the boat, figuring out the GPS, do we have enough battery life for the lights, a tinge of fear about paddling at night on the San Marcos, kicking myself because I forgot to get one of these at REI yesterday so now I have to go back (I’m obviously not excited about having to use one), etc, etc, etc.

I was so rattled by thoughts of my to do list that I had a misstep on the treadmill, fell forward, knocked into the display and almost broke my neck and twisted my ankle. I was unnerved at the thought of ‘what if’…..what if after all of this training I hurt myself three weeks out by falling on the treadmill. Ugh!

Clearly I need to relax, stay healthy, avoid injuries, and take some things off this todo list. On that note, here are three things that I can knock out right now because they involve keeping yall in the loop:

#1 – Remind yall that Tosh will be posting updates during the race on our Team Paddlefish facebook page. Please bookmark this page, or better yet, hit the LIKE button and join our facebook page so you can see the real time updates during the race. He might even have pictures.

#2 – FYI. The Professor is going to do less frequent blogposts here on FFC during the race. Once again, the Team Paddlefish facebook page is going to be the place for real time updates as we pass viewing points and checkpoints, but hopefully The Professor will be able to give a daily update here as well.

#3 – It’s not to late to contribute to my charity! I have already raised $3,174 toward finding a cure for Rett Syndrome. THANK YOU to everyone who has donated, I literally tear up every time someone makes a pledge. But my goal is $5000 so I am not done yet! Racing for this worthy cause has been an invaluable inspiration on tough training days. And it has been a beautiful message and learning experience for Little Chick who has taken fundraising and service to a new level for a ten-year old. So if you have $10 to spare, there are some Rett families who would deeply appreciate your effort and sacrifice. Click here if you are so inspired.

RUN OFF – As in Spring Fishing While Snow is Melting and Run Off Swells Western Rivers

In the spirit of relaxation and calming my frayed nerves, I am going to run off to Montana for Memorial Day for a few days. Run off will likely be in full force so I’m not sure how the fishing will be, but I really don’t care. A little fishing, grilling out, watching movies. Of course I will keep up the training and healthy nutrition, but it will be a nice reprieve from errands galore.

So that’s the report friends. Even if they are quick bursts, I will try to update here on FFC more regularly as the race nears because I cherish your comments and messages – I have the best crowd of cheerleaders on the planet and I am eternally grateful for all of your support! So stayed tuned…hopefully I will have a fish to talk about in the near future.

Banning and I paddled the San Marcos today and had an absolute blast. Lots of obstacles and tricks & turns. The main theme of the day was trees. Hanging down in our faces, jutting up straight from the bottom of the river, growing horizontally across the river, fallen down and totally blocking our path. Log jams, branches, twigs, bark, leaves…we encountered it all day.

Highlights Reel? Well, we got stuck on a rock and deftly unstuck ourselves before tumping, navigated a few rapids (quite nicely I am pleased to allow), portaged two dams, limboed below two low water crossings, chased some cattle out of the way, lost my shoe in some soft mud while scouting a portage, almost stepped on a rotting raccoon carcass, saw an owl, heard a turkey gobble, and got tangled up in some fishing line that was hanging from a tree.

Arguably the diciest (and most comedic) event of our day was getting stuck on a tree. That’s right, stuck on a tree. Just above the water. In between a few other tree trunks and limbs and all sorts of leafy chaos. I really don’t have the words to describe the cluster that landed us stuck like a seesaw atop a tree trunk that was growing straight out from the steep bank, but the highlight was when I wiggled carefully from the boat in attempt to dislodge it, slipped, and wound up wrapped around the horizontal tree trunk like a koala bear clinging to it with my arms and legs, desperately trying to avoid falling in the river.

What’s our Team Paddlefish tagline again? “Ain’t Nothin’ Pretty About It.” Truer words…

Somehow I regained composure and we both exercised some balance-beam circus-acts on the tree trunks, unwedged the canoe, and made our way safely onward — laughing hysterically.

59 days until The Texas Water Safari…

Feel free to spread this nugget through the rumor mill because it’s 100% true and it’s 100% good news.

I am thrilled to announce that good friend Colleen Harvey with Heart Of Texas Kayaks has recently become a Team Paddlefish sponsor. But the fun doesn’t stop there! This Saturday April 10th Heart of Texas Kayaks is hosting a free Demo Day at their store in Grapevine, TX.

Honey, honey yeah!

That’s right, it’s a chance to paddle around and test out over 30 different types of kayaks, including Wilderness Systems, Native, Heritage, Ocean Kayak, Perception, Liquid Logic, and Freedom Hawk. Plus, there will be special discounts for anyone who attends the Demo Day.

For more information about HOT Kayaks and their Grapevine Demo Day, visit their website or feel free to contact them directly.

Marvin Gaye may have soul but Colleen Harvey is all heart — Heart of Texas Kayak, that is. We are very grateful she is sharing it with Team Paddlefish and our charities.

Many thanks Colleen! Sing it Marvin!