Category: Kayaking

I finally got around to ordering my picture from the Great Race.
(click for bigger)

I don’t know about you, but I think it looks great. Yes, Dan, I know, I’m dropping my chin.

You know, this Thunderbolt is a mixed blessing. I’ve been doing work-outs in it, and it’s really fast and light. I want to race in it, but I’m not sure I can do it. I feel like I should go out and paddle a 10 mile training paddle keeping my heart rate around 150-155 just to see what that feels like in the boat. I also feel like I need to spend some time in waves and boat wakes so I can get comfortable with them. But neither of those things is going to happen with the Small Swells race in 8 days, and Long Lake in 15 days. I should probably install bulkheads and get better at steering the boat too.

Logically, I should probably put the Thunderbolt aside and not touch it until after Long Lake, and just do my preparation work in the Looksha. But man, I just like going fast. It doesn’t matter that by going into the “Unlimited” class with all the big boys I’m going from being semi-competitive to also-ran status. I guess I’d rather come in dead last in 1:25 than in the top three in 1:35. There are faster people on the team who feel the opposite way, and are going to race in “Touring” because they think they can win. To each his own, you know?

Given that, and given that I kind of think of Small Swells as a preparation for Long Lake rather than a goal, I think what I’m going to do is take both boats to Small Swells, and paddle the Thunderbolt unless the “swells” aren’t “small”. That way I might have a bit more of a handle on whether I can handle it at Long Lake. Or not.

Today our team work-out was a 5 mile race/time trial. Originally we were going to do individual time trials like we’d done in May, but we decided instead that Dan was going to lead us out at a steady 6.8 mph pace and we’d try to ride his and each other’s wakes as best we could. This would be good training for the two upcoming races, as well as a way to compare ourselves against the 5 mile time trial we’d done in May. This time I had the Thunderbolt underneath me, and a whole summer of hard work behind me.

Unlike last May, when I hadn’t considered myself fit enough to do 2 miles of warm up, this time I did. And then we started off, doing 1.5 miles upstream. I had little trouble keeping up with the team for that 1.5 miles, but I had a hell of a time keeping my boat pointing in a straight line. I was constantly coming in too close to the other boats and banging into them, and then swerving out so far that I wasn’t getting much benefit from their wakes. But I was with them, and that was the important thing. The turn was at a point where the canal narrows down, and I got kind of scraped off when the sides narrowed in and Dan widened out. My boat just does not want to turn, and I had to slow down to a crawl and sweep like hell out the outside. By the time I got around the corner, I was about 200 feet or more behind, and I sprinted like hell to catch up, hitting speeds upwards of 7.7 mph. I caught up, but I couldn’t really find a sweet spot on anybody’s wake and didn’t really get a good recovery. Within a quarter of a mile I was losing them again. I tried to keep near their speed, but in the words of Jim M I just didn’t have any more poker chips. While I was about a hundred feet behind them, I saw Bill F suddenly stop and clean something off his paddle. As I was wondering what he was doing, I got a long piece of fishing line around my paddle and had to do exactly what I’d seen him do to clear it off. Jim M came up from behind where he’d been paddling with some of the slower paddlers and offered to drag me up to the lead pack again, but I just didn’t have any gas left and couldn’t raise my speed even a little. But on the plus side, my “dragging myself home in pain” speed was around 6.1-6.3 mph, whereas early this year 6.1-6.3 mph was my good speed. My time for the 5 miles was 46:29. In May, my time for 5 miles was 50:14. So I’m only 3 and 3/4 minutes faster over 5 miles than I was in spring, which doesn’t seem like much considering all the training and the new boat and everything. But I was only 1 and a half minutes behind the best of the team, so I should be pleased. Plus I’d done a 5 mile paddle yesterday, and I’m in a boat I’ve got almost no time in.

As we were warming down, the Colonial Belle came by and Mike and I went to ride its wake. I got a bit of a good ride for a minute or two, but I was too wiped to keep it up much, so I left Mike to play and went back to Dan’s dock. When I pulled my boat out of the water, I got a bit of a shock. I had about 30 feet of fishing line caught in my rudder. And at the end of that fishing line, a steel wire leader and a large fishing lure of a type I believe is known as a “popper” or “surface lure”. I guess I didn’t do as good a job as Bill of getting that fishing line out of our paddles. Paul D asked me if I had a fishing license. I wonder how much drag that stupid thing added to my boat.

But good paddle or bad, what really makes it all worth while was the chance to hang out with the team. It is a great group of guys, and I’m happy to have the chance to be a member of this great team.

Today I was working on a difficult problem on my real work, and needed a break, so I went paddling in the Thunderbolt. (BTW: If you know anything about OpenSymphony’s WebWork, please have a look at this question.)

I didn’t want to encounter any waves, and I wanted it to be deep enough to paddle well and close enough to shore to swim in if I dumped, so I went to use Dan’s dock even though I knew he was out of town. I started out, and immediately had to go back to the dock to take out the toe pull-bar. It was just located in an awkward position and I couldn’t get comfortable with it. But once I got it out, I felt extremely comfortable in the boat. It didn’t feel tippy, and I had no trouble controlling it even in a few boat wakes. The boat doesn’t turn all that well, and doing a 180 at a buoy is not going to be easy, and I really don’t like the tiller bar steering. It doesn’t seem hugely faster than the Looksha, even though the lighter weight means I’ll probably be able to paddle it for longer distances. It also picks up floating debris, both on the rudder and on the bow. A couple of times I purposely ran over a stick or twig to try to scrape a leaf off the bow, and that worked pretty well. I also tried the bouncing technique I’ve seen Mike F do in his EFT, but had little to no luck with that.

But all in all, I feel as comfortable in the Thunderbolt now as I felt in the Looksha in, say, May of this year. Keep in mind that I paddled the Looksha through October and November, and then March and April, and this is my second time in the Thunderbolt. That’s what a year of good training in all sorts of conditions will do for a guy.

When I finished, Dan had arrived home and he watched me paddle around a bit. He was impressed, and convinced me that if I work hard for the next couple of weeks, I could be ready to paddle the Thunderbolt at the Small Swells and Long Lake races. We’ll see. While we were talking, a boat came by and he suggested that I go ride its wash. It wasn’t moving very fast, but it was throwing up a good wake. That was actually ideal, because without much work I could play around and try different positions. That was great, even the positions where the water was pouring into the cockpit right over my left hip. One of the better positions had one wake breaking over the front of the boat and *not* coming in the cockpit, while the second wake was just behind me pushing me along. I don’t know if it was extremely efficient of not, but it sure looked cool. A few minutes of that made me feel much more in control of the boat, and more happy about eventually facing some waves with this boat, but it also put so much water in the boat that I was thinking it wouldn’t look very cool if I sunk, so I turned back.

Tomorrow the team is having a 5 mile “race” on the canal against each other. I’m going to paddle the Thunderbolt and see how it goes. Oh, and I think I have an idea what to do about that WebWork problem.