I had announced a 06:30 start. Nobody signed up, so I exercised the enormous administrative freedom of an event with one participant and slept for another hour. I reached Maur at 07:30. Still early. Much more human.
At that hour I had enough capacity to unload the van and think about paying for parking. I did not have enough capacity to preserve the thought. The van stayed there with the equipment. The parking remained unpaid.
It took about fifteen minutes to assemble everything. I wanted to stay beside the ramp, test the seat and footrest, move my weight around, and find out how much stupidity was required to tip the kayak over.
Then another kayaker arrived and waited directly behind me. The ramp had acquired a queue. I got annoyed, launched, and started paddling before testing much of anything.
So the first thing I did in my new kayak was cross the lake. That was not the plan. The kayak did not care. It was fast, surprisingly stable, and far less interested in throwing me into the water than I had expected.
I stopped on a small dock. A man appeared to explain that it belonged to a club and I could not stay there. First crossing, first eviction. I moved to a nearby stretch of shore, made some coffee, and looked back across the lake.
On the return to Maur I timed the crossing. Ten minutes. Roughly two AOR songs. That felt offensively short, so I crossed again, explored a little, had more coffee, and came back. Four crossings on the first outing was not the cautious familiarization session I had imagined, but it was a much better test.
By then I was comfortable enough to paddle properly instead of negotiating with every movement. The back, shoulders, forearms, palms, and wrists all got involved. It is exactly the kind of work I had been looking for to complement power yoga.
Back at Maur I let the kayak dry, wiped it down, folded it, and packed the whole thing away. A real touring kayak had returned to the size of a large bag beside the van.
That was when the missing morning thought returned in paper form.
CHF 40. The kayak passed its first test beautifully. The parking experiment did not. Good morning.