JULY 2019 - KAYAKING ON THE THAMES
A great old-school GASS trip involving a number of pubs, some lightly dangerous and bloody hard kayayking, follwed by a total cock up over the food aspect.
What more could members want for??
We let the train take the strain and met up at a craft beer pub in Limehouse for a few liveners before setting off for Limehouse basin where we kitted up and boarded our kayaks.
Not everyone partook of the floating wet and difficult bit of the meeting. The SLL set (sick, lame and lazy) simply added in a few pubs rather than put in the hard slog, no fool them. Peter, Len, Tony, Phil C and JB wandered on ahead.
The rest of us did a two hour stint to make the journey from Limehouse to Hackney Wick through a veritable concrete canyon of new homes and flats that have replaced the dark and dingy warehouses that used to line the canals en-route to the Olympic Park at Stratford.
It really was amazing to see literally thousands of new homes, housing crisis! What housing crisis? It was only as we approached the less salubrious Hackney Wick that it slowed.
On the journey the usual suspects tried to sink us and other kayaks, threw water (which was probably poisonous to the touch) and generally mucked around like young kids. Good on 'em!!
In the final lock they (they being Hugh and Chris) went so far as to actually fall out of a kayak and into the lock, a modest health and safety issue for the poor supervisors, but all was well in the end.
The picture on the left shows you what the Chairman would look like with hair, the picture below shows you what our guest's bottom looks like, with hair as well.
From there it was on along the bank towards the much heralded pub owned by a mate of Brian's. All booked, table for 20, food for 20. Emails exchanged, phone calls to the manager, nothing left to chance!
Except that the f**king manager got one out of two wrong. He remembered the table - but not the grub!!! After an irate GASS organiser, sometimes know as Herr Gruppenfuher, calmed down it was a mad dash along the road to another restaurant that fortunately did us proud.
Another one for the memory banks and we all survived with hardly any cases of Lymes Disease in the ensuing weeks.