Category: Kayaking

[youtube 1_V5ai3npYI]

A couple of team members met up at Dan’s place in spite of the cold and wet weather. We worked on technique – mostly catch and rotation. Of course, as soon as we finished, it got sunny and started to warm up. Figures.

(Sorry, but as a paddler living near Irondequoit Bay, and a Great Big Sea fan, I realize I’ve probably used that title a few times already. Too bad.)

Today I met up with Doug, Bill and Steve at Baycreek Paddle Center for a paddle on Irondequoit Bay. I didn’t look at the weather beforehand, and just assumed it was going to be as horrible as it had been all week, so I dressed in my farmer john wet suit and long sleeve turtleneck. It turned out to be quite reasonable early fall weather, with temps in the mid 60s, and so I was boiling hot as we got ready. Bill, who was dressed very similar to me, just took off his shirt and paddled only in the farmer john. I, on the other hand, decided that since it was Baycreek’s annual sale, and since I’d been looking for something to wear for weather in between the running shorts and singlet of the summer and the farmer john and long sleeves of late fall, so I bought some better clothes.

It was my first time out on the bay, and my first significant waves, in the Thunderbolt. It wasn’t as wavy as it has been on hot days in the summer, but there were still a few boat wakes. And the consequences of a dump were probably a bit worse, so I’d call it even. There were places which required 100% concentration, with nothing spared for conversation or looking around. But overall, I feel that I wasn’t any shakier out there than I’d been in the early season in the Looksha.

Jim M caught up with us after about 25 minutes. He was as smooth as usual, and was talking about how much fun the waves were in places where I was concentrating on not dumping rather than having fun.

We went up to the bridge, and a little bit further. I’d forgotten my GPS, but the others told me it was about 7 1/4 miles. The first and last half mile were horrible “suck water” as the water level appears to have gone down quite a bit since the time trial season. But it was fun and I’m feeling a lot better about eventually getting comfortable in waves in this boat.

I found some Youtube video of the race. Unfortunately the camera person seems to mostly concentrate on people who’ve already finished rather than the people finishing, so I don’t get to see how my technique looked at the end of 10 miles.

You can see Mike and I for about 10 seconds towards the end, and the camera switches away seconds before the big seaplane wake hits us
[youtube 35Nbmk9H7Mg]

But here’s the finish of Mike and I, and Steve.
[youtube tgaZVuLrkyM]

You can see how messed up my heart rate monitor was, but even when it was reading normally my heart rate was up in the zone above my lactate threshold for about the first 1:10 of the 1:27 of the race. In the last couple of miles, my heart rate dropped down to the 150-160 range, which is where I attempted to stay for the whole race the previous week, and my speed didn’t really drop. I think that indicates where Mike and I were helping each other.

The organizers managed to get the results posted before the awards ceremony. I think they were using the wifi from the hotel across the bay – considering we couldn’t even get the wifi from the hotel we were staying at in the room next to the office, that’s pretty impressive.

I uploaded Vicki’s pictures to my picture gallery. Check it out, there’s some pretty good pictures there. Remember that you can click on the thumbnail to see the picture bigger, or click on the thing that looks like a projector screen up at the upper left and see a slide show. Unfortunately the camera she used for the long shots, my Nikon Coolpix 8800, does an absolutely terrible job of focusing in that situation. I tossed most of the pictures of the action because they were too fuzzy. But I kept the ones that featured me, because I’m vain that way.