My plan today was to see whether the Thunderbolt or the ski would be faster for the Fairport race coming up. The Thunderbolt is a little longer, a little narrower, a few pounds lighter, so I assume it’s a bit faster on the straights, but it turns like a tank. The ski turns very quickly, and would probably allow me to handle wakes and waves better. Since the race has three turns in 7.5 miles, the ability to turn might be critical.
What I decided to do was to paddle 1 mile downstream, do the turn at Turk Hill Bridge, and paddle 1 mile upstream, and do this in both boats to see which is faster. I was originally going to do the experiment at the upstream turn at the pylons, but that’s further away from where I parked so I would have had to paddle a lot longer on what is supposed to be a “periodization” easy week. If I knew how to get my boats to the boat house that the rowers use, that might be possible.
I did the Thunderbolt first. A boat came by and produced an extremely huge wake on the way down, but that wasn’t too big a problem. I tried to keep my heart rate under 160, although once or twice it crept up – the GPS reports my maximum heart rate on the first mile was 162. As expected, I had to slow right down for the turn. But I quickly accelerated again. But about half way up, I realized that my speed had been dropping – if you look at the graph it’s dropping steadily between 1.3 miles and 1.6 miles. I started concentrating on making a very hard catch and a quick exit, and my speed immediately jumped from 5.9 mph to 6.9, and stayed above 6.3 the entire rest of the way.
Second time was the ski. Again, tried to keep my heart rate below 160 and not work any harder than I did the first time. No boat wakes to contend with, but as expected I was ten seconds slower after a mile. I kept my speed up much better in the turn. But more importantly, I didn’t let my speed drop off and my technique deteriorate on the way up, so at the end I was only 7 seconds slower.
So here’s the problem. I didn’t go as fast as I could in the Thunderbolt, because I let my speed drop and my technique deteriorate. And I didn’t go as fast as I could in the ski, because I have my large rudder on it. I don’t actually know if the speed advantage of having the smaller rudder (and less drag) on the ski would be countered by the worse turning performance. So now I’m going to have to repeat the experiment again, maybe twice.