Category: Kayaking

A few minutes after posting that “Current Radar Picture” and declaring that I wasn’t going paddling, the skies brightened up, the sun broke through, and Jim phoned me to see if I was going. He said “Come on, it isn’t golf”. And so I went.

And since there is a race this weekend, I thought we were going to take Dan’s coaching advice and “paddle easy, work on surfing technique”. Instead, I get out to the beach, get launched, paddle out to where Mike, Doug, Bill and Stephen are waiting, and Mike says “Aim for the smoke stacks, go!” and off we went to paddle the same course that we’re probably going to race this weekend.

There was very little wave action. I’m sure the other guys thought it was flat, but there was a strong breeze from about 30 degrees off to the left of where we were going, and it was starting to whip up waves. There was a very subtle swell coming in from behind, small and very long wave length. Sometimes you could feel a bit of a ride from that. And there were a few boat wakes coming from all directions, although not very many because of the recently passed storm. I found it challenging. I’m still very twitchy in the boat, and it seemed like a double effort to paddle strongly and keep upright in the waves.

Because I had been expecting a surfing session, I hadn’t brought my camelbak, and I was very thirsty. I was also afraid to stop paddling for even a second so I couldn’t have asked anybody else for a sip of water, nor even scooped some out of the lake.

After not very long, the group sort of separated out with Mike way off ahead, Doug, Jim and Stephen paddling not very far ahead, and Bill just behind me. And not long after that Doug peeled off from the pack of three he was with and came back to shepherd Bill and I. I was afraid to look around, and so I don’t know if Bill was keeping with me or if he was falling behind, but I think he was falling behind. He’s a lot better boat handler than I am, but he hasn’t been working out all that much in the boat and he doesn’t have the fitness of the rest of us.

As we got closer to the jetty, the wind was getting stronger and stronger, and the hoped for rest in the wind shadow never happened. Instead, the jetty turned the waves from being 30 degrees off my left to coming almost directly down the jetty from my right to left, making it easy to use them to turn around in. Bill and Doug didn’t come in near to the jetty, so I couldn’t ask one of them for water, and by the time I got out to where they were and everybody was paddling the same direction, I was back in a “concentrate and try to stay upright” situation so I didn’t bother to ask.

As expected, the waves being whipped up by the wind, now behind us and angled more in towards shore, were growing. Bill and I paddled the entire distance back side by side, as he used his skill to catch waves and get a ride while I tried to do the same. We were mostly side by side but every now and then one of us would catch a good ride that the other one missed and surge ahead, only to be caught and passed as the other caught a ride. A couple of “linked runs” saw our speeds nudge up into the 7 mph and higher range, although mostly we were around 6.2 to 6.4 mph. For a while, I was really enjoying it. But then the fatigue and dehydration caught up with me and I was starting to struggle again.

Mike was miles ahead and way off to our left, well off shore. Stephen was a not as far ahead, and he was well into shore. If the waves had been any higher, he probably would have been in bad surf and been expending a lot of energy. I think Bill and I had a good line because the last mile or more was straight down wind. I have discovered that sometimes it seems better to be diagonal to the waves so you can surf faster than they are going, but I still think it’s good to have a relatively easy straight downwind surf at the end.

So it was probably too much effort this close to a major race, but on the other hand I really need more wave time and this definitely counted as that.

I may have been slightly optimistic to think that a mere 4 weeks after buying a surf ski I’d be ready to paddle the Rochester Open Water Challenge. It’s only 6 days to the race, and today I went out with Doug and Dennis to try to paddle the course. Instead, what I did was fall in. A lot. I must have fallen in and remounted 7 to 10 times, and each remount took 3 or 4 attempts before getting back in. I think I managed to paddle about 2 miles, and I’m more tired than I am after the 8 mile flat water paddle I did yesterday. Balance and remounting both use both different muscles than I’ve been using for all that flat water paddling I’ve been doing, and it doesn’t take much to exhaust me.

I haven’t gotten very good at balancing – the guys with more experience seem to just rock their hips without thought, where for me it’s entirely a conscious effort, which makes it too slow to react – I’m often doing exactly the opposite of what I need to be doing as a wave or boat wake passes. I need more experience. I can feel improvement over the last few weeks, but I’m still not good.

The other guys weren’t finding it particularly easy, and I take some solace from that, but Dennis only dumped a few times and I don’t think Doug dumped at all. But they also decided not to paddle the whole course. So maybe I’m not that far behind them. But if the conditions next week are like this, I’m not going to be able to complete the race.

Saturday was the Tupper Lake 9 Miler race. I’ve been looking forward to this race for months because last year it was the first real race I did and I was looking forward to seeing my progress. I’m in a faster boat, I’m fitter, my technique is better and I’m more used to racing. Unfortunately they announced that due to construction at “the crusher”, the normal start of the race, this year it would be a semi-loop course up and down river instead of all down river, so it won’t be directly comparable.

The weather was pretty good – a bit cool, very little wind, and it only started raining after we got in the boats to warm up. There was a huge crowd of ICF sprint kayaks, and so we would have actually preferred a bit of waves to give us an advantage over them. It turned out that most of them were in sprint boats because that’s the standard thing in Canada, rather than because they were shit hot paddlers. There were a few shit hot paddlers in sprint boats including Jim Mallory and Ken O-J and a lot of people I had no idea about.

At the start, we lined up between two buoys. There were two markers we had to round that were about 30 degrees to the right of perpendicular to the line between the buoys, so most people lined up at kind of an angle to the line. Jim and a few others actually lined up to the right of the rightmost buoy, giving themselves a shorter line to the marker, but considering how my boat turns and the traffic, I was content to be a little further to the left to approach the markers on a more obtuse angle. Except at the gun the guy beside me to my right sprints out perpendicular to the start line, cutting off me and Doug and Mike and a few others taking a more direct line to the markers. And then when I passed on the inside of him, he suddenly veered about 60 degrees to the right and slammed into me.

We reached the first marker in pretty good condition. I was on Mike Littlejohn’s side wake, Doug was on his tail, we were catching Bill, and there were only a few kayaks ahead of us, including Jim and one of the Canadians who were pulling ahead. We passed Bill before the channel.

Entering the channel, we had a bit of following seas, but with little wind it could very well be of our own making. Doug says there was a strong current coming out, but I didn’t notice it – although my GPS does record a drop in speed to under 6mph briefly. We quickly turned up river, but there didn’t seem like much percentage in skulking up the bank the way Jim was doing because there was little current and lots of weeds in close. An old guy in an old fashioned sprint boat came chugging by with excellent and effortless looking technique, and Doug was on his wake like a limpet. Mike Littlejohn got on Doug’s wake, and I was still on his side wake. I tried to pull up to Doug’s side wake, but I just couldn’t get over the one wave on to the next. The river turned, and Doug veered towards my side, and suddenly I was on his stern wake and Mike Littlejohn was trying unsuccessfully to stay on my side wake. After a while the old guy got a gap on us, and Mike dropped behind, and it pretty much stayed like that until the oxbow loop that was the turn. Doug managed to gap me once or twice but I struggled back on.

In the oxbow, it wasn’t quite as shallow as I’d feared. Kent O-J finally caught us (he’d had some trouble with the waves in the lake in his new sprint boat), and when he went by Doug put on a burst of speed to stay with him. It wasn’t successful for very long, but it was enough for him to open an insurmountable gap over me. I tried like hell to use every trick to bridge the gap, but I never got any closer.

It was along the final stretch of river that we encountered a guide boat that had been in on a dock and suddenly decided to blunder out into out path. Doug yelled at them and they slowed, but I still had to swing out around them.

We started passing the c-2s who had started in an earlier wave, and it was nice – you could pull in to thier stern wake, recover a bit, lower your heart rate and breathing, get a drink, then sprint like hell for the next one or one a few canoes up. I did most of the sixth and seventh miles like that. Doug wasn’t doing that, so he was pulling away even more. Doug was closing on three boats just tantalizingly out of reach – the old guy in the 1985 sprint boat, Kent O-J, and a guy in a light yellow Kayak Pro boat. The top two, Jim Mallory and that French Canadian guy, had finished before I was in site of the line.

I was exhausted at the end. I’d gone out a lot faster than I had at Round The Mountain, and I had nothing in the tank at the end. I ended up being third in under 50, behind the Canadian guy who’d outsprinted Jim and Doug. Jim won over 50. Mike Finear was about a minute behind me and won Touring class. Mike Littlejohn is evidently calling his boat Unlimited class now, and he finished somewhere between me and Mike F. Bill was not too far behind Mike, doing well in spite of the fact that he doesn’t paddle as much as the rest of us.

Compared to last year, this year I did 6.75 miles in 1:02, for an average speed of 6.5 mph. Last year, in a slower boat with less conditioning, I did 7.21 miles in 1:07, for an average speed of …. 6.5 mph. Hmmm. The only thing I can say in my favour is that this year, the first three miles were upstream and the last 3.75 miles were downstream, and last year the whole distance was downstream.

Update: Official results are up. Evidently as well as the three guys Doug was closing in on, there was another guy in a Marauder and a Canadian woman (so probably in a sprint boat) about a minute ahead of them. So while I was third in Men’s Under 50 Unlimited, I was actually about 9th fastest kayak. Sigh.