First thing this morning I went for a paddle. I made the mistake of asking to try one of those KayakPro Marlin boats that I mentioned seeing speeding up the creek a few days ago. It was nice. At first it felt quite tippy, but after a few minutes I was paddling pretty hard and not having any trouble staying upright. But there was a bit of an undercurrent of “if you don’t pay attention, it can turn around and bite you”. I was paddling as hard as I could, and it was hardly producing any bow wave at all, unlike the Skerry. When I go hard in the Skerry, I usually find the point where the bow wave gets “big”, and then slack off a bit from there, but without that cue, I wasn’t sure how fast I was going. They told me only to take it for 15 minutes, so I did this little circuit that you can make out of alternate channels in the creek. Towards the end, I was getting tired and I found myself having to think about staying upright more again. I’ve also never paddled a boat with a rudder before, and I had to think about how to use that – evidently the idea is that you can concentrate on doing a power stroke and use the rudder to steer rather than doing a less efficient sweep to steer.
The guy at Baycreek suggested that I come to the Wednesday night racing series and do the course one night with my Skerry, and come back the following night and do it with the Marlin to see how much faster it is. Oh, this could be dangerous – I could really fall in love with this boat. I wonder which boat, the Skerry or the Pgymy, I’ll end up selling to pay for it?
Anyway, 15 minutes wasn’t enough of a workout for me, so after bringing back the Marlin I went for another paddle in my Skerry. It was a beautiful day, and I got a bit of a sunburn on the top of my head.