Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls...

step right up, step right up. Two bits is what it costs, just two bits. Witness a spectacle... nay, an aberration of nature. A freak of the canoe world. Behold: FRANKENCANOE!
What you are looking at is Team Marines' 2010 Water Safari entry - a home built forty foot aluminum canoe for 6 paddlers. Forty. Feet. Made from cutting an Osagian canoe in half and welding 23 feet of metal in the middle, those guys finished the race in 60 hours.
Team Cuatro Sinko planned to race the CR 100 in it, but about 24 hours after our team captain bought the thing, race officials finally returned our emails and informed us that the race was limited to solo and tandem boats. Wow. Oh, well - their loss.
We will be racing instead in the Jr. Safari, the first 16 miles of the regular Texas Water Safari (familiar territory). Will this mean we get competitive? First let's see if we can even steer the thing!

Cool TWS Vid

Not as elegant as a pod of dolphins, but here's some nice underwater footage of the Texas Water Safari race start.
And here is some neat time lapse of Palmetto (one of the checkpoints) at night.

July!

That month usually doesn't have an exclamation point on the end of it for me, but it's been almost a week since I watered my plants - or needed to. We've had a cool front bring us several inches of rain and highs in the low 90's. Wow! Summer is 1/2 over, and I haven't even thought to myself, "when is this going to end?!". It's a shame the rest of the country has been having record heat waves.
Team Cuatro Sinko, it seems, is up for another canoe challenge: the Colorado River 100. You guessed it - it's a 100 mile race down the Colorado River. Happens on Labor Day. Just enough time to get good and flabby if I don't continue training.
Also, it looks like the team is in the planning stages of the Texas 200 (these events have very clever names) - the 200 mile sail up the Texas coast. We have two options: sail a Catalina 22 (a very capable shoal-draft boat with a swing-keel) or rig our canoe Tinkerbell with a Sunfish rig and fit it with amas (pontoons) to make it a trimaran. In true "go big or go home" Cuatro Sinko style, we are currently considering both. Heck yeah!