BCMCA Nanaimo RR

After waiting in the rain here in Port Moody for a week, Sunday was a beautiful day. We took the ferry over and rode to the race with plenty of time to spare...

Unfortunately though about 4km into the race I could feel the familiar thump-thump of a slowly leaking tire... so had to turn around and limp back to the start line... put a new tube in and started again... only to have it happen again.. It appears from that post mortem that I probably got a kink in the tube while installing it. As they say, Haste makes waste...

We managed to get the original tube to hold air so we could head back to ferry... only to get yet another flat less than half way there.. So there I was on the side of the road, 10km from the ferry terminal, flat tire, no spare, can't patch because it was a blowout. And my ferry will be leaving in about 45 minutes..

With nothing much to loose I stuck out my thumb. As Blanche DuBois says, "I have always relied on the kindness of strangers." and hoped that one of the seemingly endless line of pickups would pick up...

Well Vancouver Island is a pretty laid back place and a nice guy pulling a small open boat on a trailer almost immediately pulled up and asked where I was going etc.. Said to toss the bike into the boat and 15 minutes later I was at the ferry terminal. Arriving about 3 minutes ahead of the rest of my group.

Getting back to the bike at the end of the trip we found that the rear tire was once again flat... so the score for the day was four flats!

And precious little riding... other than the 15km warmup and 4km of racing :-(

From what I could see from the sidelines it looked like a fairly intense pace was set. Mike Sevcov, Derek Tripp and Don Shaw caught most of the 60's in the first (of three) laps with Dave Mercer (and perhaps one other rider) being off the front (individually) by less than a couple of minutes at that point. They where caught shortly after that and I think those three plus Dave managed to just stay off the 30-40's to take the win.