Category: Kayaking

Today was the Long Lake Long Boat Regatta, my favourite and unfortunately last race of the year. Two years ago it was my first race outside of the Bay Creek time trials, last year it was my second race in the Thunderbolt where I did surprisingly well, and this year was an awesome surprise.

The weather forecast was horrible – lots of wind, and a fair chance of rain. On the drive up, and after we arrived at our cabin last night, the wind was stronger than I liked, but not horrible, but every now and then there would be a few minutes where it was blowing very, very strong. I have no way to estimate the wind, but when it was blowing hard I wouldn’t have been surprised if they said 40 mph. I was surprised that it didn’t set off some car alarms.

This morning, the wind was pretty much the same – a steady but not really strong wind, and occasionally one of these sustained gusts that was blowing all the boats around. One guy’s boat started rolling down the hill, and Vicki and Susan turned it upside down to stop it from blowing away. The owner of the boat came along, listened to Vicki explain what they did, and promptly turned it back upright and walked away again. Not too surprisingly, his boat promptly stared blowing again, and this time it ran over and broke his paddle. DUH! Another guy was putting down his guide boat and a gust of wind caught it and he nearly dropped it on Paul D’s paddle. I rescued his paddle and PFD and tucked them in closer to his ski so it was less likely to get crunched.

After the racer’s meeting, everybody launched and started milling around. Another sustained gust hit just then, and I was starting to think this was going to really bad. Vicki had convinced me to wear my PFD against my judgment, but at that point I was wondering how long I’d be swimming before a rescue boat picked me up. A woman with a Think surfski managed to swim twice before the starting gun went off, and then decided not to race after all.

They were doing a mass start with the war canoes going up wind and everybody else going down wind. The war canoes had the finish line buoys to line up on, but the rest of us were just told to “line up in front of the seaplanes”, which is so vague as to be useless. To make matters worse, they told us “3 minutes to start” at least three times, and then told us “30 seconds to start” several more times. Meanwhile everybody lined up was getting blown further and further down-lake.

Finally, after yet another “30 seconds to start”, I heard “10 seconds to start” and started my GPS. And probably not much more than 10 seconds after that, I heard “GO” and I started paddling. Except I was kind of taken aback to be out in front. That’s not normal, so I looked around, and was relieved to see the canoes had started as well. It was probably less than half a minute before Doug and Mike in their K-2 charged past, and seconds after that that Roger Gocking, the paddling machine, came by. The strong tail wind was giving me lots of surf. I heard Mike say to Doug to “build into it” and I thought that was a good idea. I was trying not to go out too fast and fade like I do so often.

After a few minutes, Paul D called from behind me “As long as we’re together, let’s trade off every mile”. It sounded like a good plan to me. But I was surprised that Dave W wasn’t riding my wake as well – he’s usually minutes faster than me, and he’s a master at finding a good wake to ride for the early part of the race. A few seconds after my GPS beeped for the first mile, Paul called “Coming up on your left, slow down so I can get past”. With the surf behind us, it was hard to go slower, and so when I didn’t slow down enough he said “take a drink”, which I did and that got him past me.

Paul pulled hard, but again with the surf behind us, I occasionally ended up beside him instead of behind him. But I was getting some benefit from being behind him so I tried to stay back there.

When my turn came, I pulled ahead, and the waves were definitely getting much rougher. Instead of just punching through everything, occasionally there would be one that was so big the water would meet on top of the deck of my kayak. I would slow down a bit and wait for the wave behind me to build up until it was giving me a better push, and then I could blast through the big one or two ahead of me. My speed was fluctuating wildly because of the conditions, depending on whether I was riding a wave or attempting to smash through one. Plus I’d already washed away my boat number and I was trying to remember what it was since I’d have to call it out to the turn-around boat and the finish. I was figuring I wasn’t doing Paul any good with the speed ups and down, and so when the next mile came and I called to see if he was there, I wasn’t too surprised that I didn’t get a response.

So now I’m all alone. Roger Gocking is ahead of me, but taking very strange lines – every time I looked he seemed to be at a 45 degree angle to the line I was taking, but still pulling away. I knew Dave W was behind me somewhere and probably gaining, and my normal marker Mike was a tiny little spec in a K-2 way ahead. It was going to come down to my ability to pace myself, and my ability to handle these rough conditions. I knew I had faded badly in the second half of last week’s Erie Canal Regatta and also in previous races such as Armond Bassett, so I was concerned I was going to hard, but I had to go faster than the surf since I was only in a half skirt and I’d already taken on some water punching through the big waves.

When I reached the turn around, I had my usual tense moments as the boat went cross-ways to the waves. But I could see that Paul had latched onto the wake of a C-4, and Dave W was with him, both about 30 seconds to a minute behind me. Going into the wind, I was trying to figure if it was worth the extra distance to follow the right shore, which was a little bit wind shadowed but also well out of the straight line. The K-2 and Gocking weren’t doing that – as earlier, Gocking seemed to be almost tacking back and forth, and I was having trouble even seeing where the K-2 was.

I was thinking I might try for the wind shadow behind this small island in the middle of the lake when Dave came by. I was about 3/4 of a mile from the turn around, and he’d made an incredible gain by making up all that time in such a short distance. I decided I was going to try to grab onto his stern wake and hold it for however long I could, which after that gain I was figuring wouldn’t be too long. He was going straight for the passage between the island and the right shore, with no attempt to go for a wind shadow anywhere. I figured I’d have to use him as my wind shadow. It wasn’t a huge help – I spent most of the time between 1 and 2 boat lengths behind him, far too far back for any help from his wake or from his wind shadow, but it was a goal, a carrot dangling in front of me. He was relentless. Instead of slowing down when the winds were gusting hard or the waves were high, he just kept paddling at almost exactly the same pace and exactly the same style. I tried to adjust to a lower paddling style and a full grip on my paddle during the strong gusts, but with him right there I could no longer allow myself to slow down.

When we passed through the narrows between the island and the point on the right, the wind whipped the waves into white caps. I’d heard Mike talk about the wind tunnel effect on Long Lake before, but this was incredible. I dropped another boat length behind Dave and heard myself think “hey, I stayed with him for over a mile, that’s pretty decent”, but then I said “HELL NO, I’M NOT GIVING UP”, and started doing a really fast “hit and out” paddle stroke, and caught back up to him.

I was right in his stern wash as we came into the last more sheltered part. He didn’t speed up any, and I came alongside. I’ve watched enough Tour de France to know what was coming next – he’d let me go ahead, and then slingshot past me in the final sprint. And I was ok with that – he’d towed me for 4 miles, and he was normally minutes ahead of me, so finishing a boat length behind him was a victory for me. As I came alongside, he said “If we’d worked together, we could have caught Gocking”. I explained I was doing everything I could to stay with him, taking a pull or two wasn’t in the cards for me. And then it played out exactly like I expected – I pulled ahead half a boat length, the speed slowly increased, and as we hit 7.1 mph he pulled ahead and kept accelerating all the way to the line. I finished mere seconds behind him, in what I consider one of the best finishes of my (short) career.

In the aftermath, I have to give full credit to two things:

• All the time the Bay Creek Paddling Team has spent in rough conditions in the last two years and
• Dan telling me to shorten my paddle this week. I’d lengthened it on Jason Q’s advice to try to get better catch, but I hadn’t made the connection that the longer paddle was probably why I was fading so much in the races, until Dan pointed out that I was shoveling vast quantities of water into the air at the end of my stroke.

So thanks Dan, and thanks to the rest of the team for another great year. Next year I’m going to try to do the 90, so I’m going to spend the winter trying not to lose my conditioning, and trying to lose a bunch of weight.

I’m not going to paddle “The 90” (the Adirondak Canoe Classic, 90 miles over 3 days). I’ve made it a goal to do it next year. So this year, I’m trying to wheedle my way into Doug and Mike’s “pit crews”. The pit crew (traditionally their wives) meets them at various portages to provide them with refills for their camelbaks and energy gels and bars. Since the four of them are going up in Doug’s truck, having me come up on my own car means that if one of the paddlers blows up or has problems, the pit crews can split up and one of them can move on to the next portage while the other one waits.

Another thought I had is that I can bring my kayak and go out on the course. Initially I was thinking I could go out before or after the racers come through, but I decided to ask the organizer (Brian) if it would be possible to for me to use my kayak to film parts of the race (especially the start) and possibly even resupply the racers in parts of the course that don’t have convenient portages. I promised to be careful not to get into anybody’s way or provide direct aide to anybody. His response to my email was generally positive and he suggested I phone him tomorrow to discuss the details.

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.

The workout for the day was “Easy Distance” – I was to try to keep my heart rate under 135 and just go, but every mile do 30 seconds really hard. I wasn’t sure how far I could go, and it was raining, so I decided to go upstream for mile, then downstream for two miles, and just keep doing that as long as I could or until it started thundering – I’d always be within a mile of the dock, so it would be able to stop at just about any time.

I ended up doing 8 miles. But after I passed the dock and was spinning around to dock up again, I noticed something – my PFD (life jacket) was floating jammed up against the upstream edge of the dock. I have no idea when the bungee net that holds it down on the back of my boat popped off – it could have been when I first started, or it could have been at the end, I don’t know. All I know is that I’m damn lucky that I didn’t do my usual up and back and lose it up at the furthest point and then have to go back, or that it didn’t miss the dock and go floating downstream and get lost in bushes somewhere. Especially since my car key was in the pocket of it. And the pocket wasn’t totally zipped up, so I was also lucky it didn’t fall out.

[youtube 4wGGQpa_TO8]

The Owasco Lake Challenge was a very different race than it probably could have been. Because it was only a week after I got back from England, I decided that I wouldn’t be ready to do the 12 mile long course. That lead to some other decisions – because I was only going to do the short course race and so I wouldn’t be racing for points, I decided that rather than doing everything I could to do the best I could at this race, I was going to make it part of my plan to get back into shape and try to get back some of the speed that I’d had in the early season races like Round the Mountain and Tupper Lake but which seemed to be missing in Armond Bassett.

So contrary to any logical tapering for a race, I went out and did the Bay Creek Time Trial twice on Wednesday, and on Thursday I did a slow 10 mile paddle. I did rest Saturday, but only because it was horribly stormy and rainy. Otherwise I probably would have gone out and done some more long slow distance.

The was a pretty good crowd at the race – Tom Murn, Stephen B and Matt and Julia T were all in the short course with me, and Jim M, Mike and Paul D all did the long course. As well as old familiar faces, there were a few I’d never seen before. Quite the biggest surprise was Roger Gocking, who is a bit of a legend of the 90 Miler as well races like the Mayor’s Cup. The guy is incredibly tall, skinny, and has a “wingspan” that looked like a foot longer than mine.

I brought both boats – I was planning to evaluate the conditions and decide right at the last possible minute which boat to take. But when Scott said that he was shortening the long course to 10 miles because there was a possibility of thunderstorms later in the day, I settled on the ski, just in case the wind whipped up the lake. In retrospect, I probably could have paddled the Thunderbolt, but I doubt it made all that much difference.

As I was getting the ski ready, I did something which in retrospect was pretty dumb – I figured that because there weren’t many waves yet, I’d tape over the venturi drain so I was sitting in tepid water at the start. I’d seen other ski paddlers do that, and it made sense to me. What I didn’t count on, however, was the amazing amount of splashing at the start of the race – before we had gotten out of the shallows at the beginning, I was swamped and thanks to that stupid piece of tape I wasn’t draining. If you watch the video, in the first part you can see me pause quickly and say “SHIT” – that’s because my first attempt at removing the tape was unsuccessful because my Camelbak had slipped over it. It’s not on the video, but a few minutes later I took a longer pause and got it off.

One thing I didn’t realize until afterwards is that Matt Tole had been riding my wake from the start, and on one of those pauses he’d tried to pass me. I’d started paddling, caught a nice boat wake, and dropped him and he never got close to me again.

Tom Murn was well ahead of me after the tape removal exercise, and I tried like hell to catch him. I was getting closer every time I got a good surf on a wake, and at the turn it looks on the video like he’s only 20 to 25 seconds ahead. But I lost too much time at the turn, and with just enough tail wind to make sure I wasn’t getting cooled off, but not enough to kick up any good surf, I faded fast. I ended up finishing several minutes behind him. Stephen B was also up there ahead – early on I’d seen him way off to the right with his son Erin, and I assumed he was paddling with Erin, but then he suddenly came back into my view right at the turn fairly close to Tom, and he stayed pretty even with Tom from my viewpoint all the way to the finish.

On the way back in Dan was yelling encouragement – he’d come, but decided not to paddle, so he was out on the course coaching us. He advised me to punch it hard just before the shallows at the last half mile, and then surf my own wake in. Nice plan, but I didn’t have the energy to punch it more than a tiny bit, and I didn’t feel any wake. I guess it’s good that even for a shorter race I managed to use up all my energy by the end, but man I wish I had a faster time to show for it.

After finishing I paddled around a bit to warm down, and watch the other finishers. And then I went to try out the Nelo surf ski that Janet the Nelo rep brought out to demo. It’s tippier than the V10 Sport, for sure, but after dumping it once I managed to keep it upright. I can’t extend the foot brace far enough forward for my tastes – my knees were quite high, probably higher than a sprinter would have. It seemed strange that you needed an allen key to adjust the foot brace, but then again I never adjust my foot brace after I got it right the first time, so I guess it wouldn’t be too big a deal. Anyway, I don’t see another surf ski in my immediate future.

While I was messing about in the Nelo ski, I got to see Jim Mallory win the long race, and Roger Gocking come only a few minutes behind. That was impressive. I think some C-2s came in between the two of them – three of them came in within a few seconds of each other.

Just about every participant got a “OLC” branded boat chamois, and a nice medal for top three finishers. As well, Jim and the two paddlers in the top C-2 got these really beautiful framed 1905(?) hydrological maps of Owasco Lake. Probably the nicest prizes I’ve ever seen at a paddle race.

Oh well, time to get serious and see about getting some speed back in time for Long Lake.