Today the team met for our first paddle on the lake. Originally Stephen had said I might be able to paddle his v10 sport surf ski, while he used his new v12. But it was too rough, so he took the sport, leaving me in the Thunderbolt. This is my first time on the lake in it, and probably only my second time in waves – the race being the first.
I was moderately nervous as I went out a few hundred metres into the swell. I waited for a small lull and turned down, and actually got a few nice runs. But as I attempted to turn up swell again, I dumped leaving me cold, wet, and even more nervous about the swell.
Dan immediately set course to a lighthouse which is about 5 miles away, but of course it was exactly 90 degrees to the swell, which is the worst. I was determined to give it a chance, hoping my nervousness would abate. I told several people how nervous I was and Mike and Paul kept fairly close to reassure me.
Dennis, a paddler I know through Facebook whom I’ve never met in person before, showed up. He was test paddling a new v10 sport to see if the cockpit was easier on his back than his old v10 sport. He, like everybody else except me, was showing every sign of enjoying the swells.
After half an hour of slow paddling, I realized that I wasn’t getting any less nervous, and the fear was making me more tired than hard paddling would. I was thirsty as hell, but couldnt grab a drink because i didnt dare take a hand off my paddle I knew I was never going to survive another hour of this. So I told Dan I needed to turn back and I needed somebody to go with me. He turned the whole group around. He paddled with me and said he’d stay with me. I was grateful because I’d already dumped once, in shore, and now we were hundreds of metres off shore and a long way from where we’d started. I knew that a dump out here would require a long, cold swim to shore, abandoning my boat and paddle since I am unable to remount this boat, and then a several mile walk back to the parking lot.
So it was with more than a little consternation that not more than five minutes later I realized that Dan wasn’t anywhere around. Mike was still with me, so that wasn’t too bad. He stayed with me until we were about a mile and a half from the start, but then he disappeared as well. Not sure where he went, but he’s not the one who promised that he’d never abandon me. Dennis came up beside me and talked to me. I was getting more and more tired, and the fear and the tiredness was making me less and less in control of the boat.
Dennis disappeared for some reason, and I just about freaked out. I was shaking, and on the verge of tears. I was sure my only hope was to swim for it. I screamed for help, and Dennis showed up – I think he’d just dropped behind. I was even less able to think straight or paddle straight. I was barely moving at all, and doing more bracing than anything else.
As I got parallel to the beach where I’d launched, I was able to turn down swell and pick up the pace. I didn’t quite get a ride from the waves, but at least I wasn’t fighting them. But as I was getting out of the boat, a wave hit me and I fell on my paddle shaft, snapping it in two. What a perfectly horrible way to end a perfectly horrible day.
At this point, I’m not even sure I want to replace the paddle. This was supposed to be fun. Maybe I’ll feel better tomorrow, but right now I don’t want to paddle and I definitely don’t want to see or talk to Dan.
The day dawned cool, damp and fairly breezy. Not optimal, but better than last year’s legendary strong winds and waves, which thankfully I missed. Much of the discussion around breakfast and after we got to the start area was around what to wear – you don’t want to get chilled in the wind on the lakes, but you also don’t want to get too hot on the sheltered bits. Well, that and scoping out the competition. As well as the four of us from Baycreek (Doug, Mike, Frank and I), there was Lars, the guy who sold a couple of us our Brasca paddles, in a v-12, two guys in Nelo Vipers, Mike Littlejohn in his shorter cedarstrip, and we somehow missed seeing George Belarose, Mike F’s rival and nemesis from Tupper Lake last year although we saw him at the finish. Other than the v-12, I figured I had it made in unlimited class until Kent Olmholt-Jensen told me that he’d entered his Viper in unlimited class. If the other Viper was in unlimited as well, I was out of contention. But that’s ok, I figured that once I’d started paddling the Thunderbolt, I had said goodbye to wooden plaques and ribbons.
One aside about Kent O-J: He lives in Chelsea Quebec, not too far from where I used to live, and for some reason I keep wanting to call him Karl. I wonder if I met a Karl O-J through orienteering or cross country skiing when I lived there. (I’ve looked it up – Jarl O-J was a member of the Canadian Olympic cross country ski team at the 1972 Olympics in Sapporo. I wonder if he’s a relative?)
We lined up at the start, with Frank, Mike and I between two C-2s. I’m not sure where Doug ended up. The two C-2s kept squeezing in, and eventually about 15 seconds before the start the one on my left went ahead of me and further right until he ended up to my right between Mike and I.
(If you look carefully, you can see George Belarose paddling around watching the race leave – I guess he didn’t hear the pre-race meeting where they announced that Touring kayak would leave in the second wave rather than the third. I bet he felt lonely being the only kayak in the third wave.)
At the start siren, it was the usual chaotic mess as everyone was searching for the line they wanted or a wake to ride. I had my usual slow start, but to quote bicycle commentator Paul Sherwin, once my ‘big diesel engine’ winds up, I do ok. I was coming up behind Mike, who was just on the left wake of a C-2 sterned by a guy with a Mohawk with a pony tail in the back (in reference to the way a mullet is sometimes referred to in Canada as ‘hockey hair’, I thought that hairstyle should be called ‘lacrosse hair’), when the C-2 suddenly veered sharply to the left, cutting Mike off badly. I decided to swing right to get out of the mess of canoe wakes, but as we left the relative shelter of Ampersand Bay the waves got really bad. They were definitely the worst I’ve handled in the Thunderbolt. I kept telling myself that if this wasn’t a race I would have wimped out. I was now near Doug, and we passed one of the Vipers, this one paddled by a guy in a florescent green high visibility jacket. He was evidently enjoying the waves as much as I was. Doug was heading off towards the wind shadow of an island which looked like a great idea to me so I went with him. He told me I was doing a great job, but he couldn’t see my heart rate monitor – fear and excitement had pushed my heart rate up into the mid to high 170s, which is higher than I’d ever seen it.
Once we got into the wind shadow, I could start paddling for distance instead of survival. I was now ahead of all the kayaks except for the v-12 and the two vipers (the guy with the green jacket passed us almost as soon as we got into the wind shadow). I think Doug was right behind me and Mike wasn’t far behind, although I wasn’t going to pause to look back. We were passing some of the recreation boats that had started in the wave ahead of us, and I tried to say something encouraging as I passed them. There was a buoy at the turn into the river, and I was catching this rec kayaker who was all arms and no torso, and I was about to give some advice on that when he yelled ‘Right of way’ at me. I said ‘seriously dude, you’re going to challenge me for the buoy?’ I went inside the buoy, and then he called ‘sorry’.
The river was narrow and winding, and even the lakes had serpentine courses marked out in buoys to avoid the rocks and shallows. I saw a c-2 sneak through a narrow bit between the shore and an island, but Kent O-J went around. I saw the guy in the green jacket go through the ‘sneak’, but suddenly jam his paddle in a braking maneuver, so I decided to go around. Doug and Mike went through the sneak and I had to paddle like hell to get back on terms with them. Doug has a very small rudder and Mike has a kick-up rudder, so they could risk it more than me. As I pulled back ahead of Doug, he suggested I try to catch the C-2 that was a few lengths ahead, but I tried like hell and I couldn’t get them. Ironically, it was the same boat that had crowded me at the start.
Not long after that, we went under the bridge where our wonderful support crew (wives) were going to meet us to cheer us on. We could see a guy standing on the bridge taking pictures and a guy under the bridge with a dog, but we could hear women cheering. It wasn’t until we got under the bridge that we saw them on a fishing access dock. It lifted my spirits to see them there.
About a mile after that was the carry, a few hundred meter portage, up and down a steep ridge. The C-2 hit just ahead of me, but they just each grabbed an end and ran. I started to get out and got a terrible leg cramp. Doug got out and just danced up the hill as I slowly trudged after. Although he did manage to hit his boat on a tree, which was amusing. By the time he got down to the dock and away, and I got to the dock, he was a couple of hundred metres ahead. Mike arrived at the dock right behind me, but rather than use the other side of the dock he waited for me to clear my side. He assumed I was going to be faster than I was, so I kind of partially responsible for his delay. He said he’ll try to catch me so we can work together to catch Doug, so I pulled away from the dock and then paused to adjust my seat and drink hose and have a drink. I started paddling and I felt quite a bit slower than before.
Mike eventually caught me, but we were both spent, and neither of us wanted to up the pace. We could see Doug up ahead but he wasn’t getting any closer or further away. He was looking back every now and then. I wondered if he had slowed down for us and was wondering what was taking us and why weren’t we catching up, but he tells me afterwards that he was going hard too and was worrying about us catching up.
There were a couple more places where you had to decide to take the sneak or go around an island, and I was so tired that I risked it every time. I bumped my rudder a few times and jammed my paddle once, but I think most of them were net gains.
The last bit into Lake Flower was into a strong head wind, which was not appreciated since we were heading almost 180 degrees differently than when we’d been leaving Ampersand Bay, also into a head wind. I sort of thought that since we’d had a head wind on the way out, it wouldn’t be too much to expect a tail wind on the way back, but that’s racing, I guess.
Mike and I were still side by side, but he was a ways off to the right and I thought I was going more direct, so we weren’t supporting each other. So I decided this time I wasn’t going to get out sprinted at the end like at Long Lake, so I dug deep and put on some extra speed and managed to beat him by a second or two.
It turned out that while Kent O-J had registered his Nelo Viper in Unlimited, the guy in the green jacket had registered his in Touring, so I ended up third in Unlimited
Doug won Touring in the under 50 category.
Mike came second in Touring in the over 50 category.
Frank was only 7 minutes behind Mike and I, and only 3 minutes slower than George Belarose. That’s pretty incredible, considering he’s probably 20 years older than any of us.
No word yet on how many NYMCRA points each of us got.
I think we surprised a few people by upping our game this year.
I’m trying to recover from the damage to my elbows and shoulders from the hard workout I did last Tuesday with the other paddle. On Thursday, I did a very easy paddle – the team were doing intervals, but I just went slowly and recovered. I did a few short bits of faster paddling, but when I did my elbows were very sore.
Because of that, I took a couple of days off. Then on Monday, I went erging after work. I figured that I could adjust the resistance and make sure I didn’t hurt my elbows any more. I did 1000 m warm up with very low resistance, 2000 m fast with moderate resistance, 2000 m fast with heavy resistance, then 1000 m warm down. Didn’t hurt much at all, which made me hopeful, but I videoed and my technique looked ok, but not great.
Today, I went out on the boat. Since this weekend’s race has a portage, one thing I was practicing was coming in hard, jumping out the boat, carrying it, jumping back in, and paddling off hard. Good practice for doing the dock, but the water was too cold to practice beach launching. It also makes for some strange looking video as I pick up the boat with the camera attached and sling it on my shoulder. I’ll spend the rest of the week doing some easy paddling and fixing up some things on my boat. Because of the set backs of the last couple of weeks I haven’t exactly prepared for this race the way I wanted to, but I have a lot more base than I did for my first race last year.
Early on in my attempts to become a kayak racer, I encountered some elbow pain and got very discouraged. But after a while it settled down to a level that I could manage by taking way more Alieve (Naproxen Sodium) than any doctor would recommend. (Yeah, my kidneys will probably explode some year, but unlike chronic joint pain, doctors know how to treat that.)
I’ve been paddling a hell of a lot, and so far I’ve had no increase in elbow pain over last year – if anything I’m taking less Alieve than before.
But I’ve been paddling the same paddle, a Basca VIII-max, since I first learned how to paddle a wing paddle. It’s a good paddle, but very large. I’ve lately been wondering if there might be some advantages to a smaller blade. One thing about the VIII-max is that it’s so long it doesn’t get “buried” entirely in the water at the catch, but gets progressively more blade in the water as the stroke progresses. I consider that’s probably a good thing for my joints, but experienced paddlers like Dan and Jim keep nagging me about it. So I borrowed a Basca IV clone (I think it’s a Danny Broadhurst, but it doesn’t have any identifying marks on it) from Dan, and I paddled it yesterday for about 15 km. Jim kept telling me my catch looked very strong.
Today my elbows are sorer than they’ve ever been, and my shoulders are in agony. I’ve never had shoulder problems before. This is not a good thing – so far in my life, every time I’ve developed a new joint pain it has not gone away or even abated, ever. Starting with knee pain 35 fucking years ago. Every pain only gets worse. So I view a new joint pain with some alarm.
Needless to say, I won’t be paddling the IV again. I just hope that my shoulders forgive me when I go back to my nice gentle catch with the VIII-max. Mean time, I’m taking an unplanned day off of paddling, and gobbling the Alieve and Tylenol.
Discovered that one of my hard disks was flakey and returned it. That’s probably why all my previous attempts to set this up failed.
Removed the daughter card RAID controller. The built-in RAID controller still sees the disks, but reports them at a JBOD (Just a Box Of Disks).
Started a new Debian installation.
Set up the both whole disks as the software RAID1 (instead of just a partition on each disk like I did last time).
Make the whole RAID (md0) into a physical volume (xen-space) for the LVM.
Created a 4Gb root partition and a 1Gb swap partition as logical volumes on the physical volume.
Did a base install. Noted that because I used software RAID on the whole thing, it uses LILO instead of Grub. Oh well, you can’t have everything.
Rebooted and the BIOS only saw one of the two disks.
Fiddled with the disk sled, rebooted, and this time it saw both.
Evidently the first boot without the second disk caused the raid to degrade, so re-added the disk mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdb1 and now it appears to be rebuilding.
Day 2:
Installed smartmontools, and enabled in /etc/defaults/smartmontools. Express slight concern that /dev/sda has an exit status of 64 because of some error in the log, probably due to the late unpleasantness. Will have to figure out how to clear that.
Installed munin-node and munin-plugin-extras, and copied the configuration from my backup from the last time
Installed openssh-server (unselect xauth which gets added automatically because it drags in a ton of X11 libraries). Copied /etc/ssh/sshd_config and /root/.ssh directories from backup.
Day 3:
Installed xen-utils. Holy shit that dragged in a lot of dependencies, and it said it had to “reinstall” 200+ packages for some damn reason. But then it gave an error, and when it came back it didn’t have to reinstall them after all. Very odd.
Didn’t see any xen in /etc/lilo.conf, so installed linux-image-2.6-xen-amd64. (Had originally thought that installing xen-utils would do that, I thought it did last time.)
Lilo complains that /vmlinuz is too big. According to the docs, lilo and xen don’t play together well, and grub has trouble with /dev/md0 software raid. I think I may have to go back to the drawing board, either re-installing the raid card, or going back to the primary boot partition and putting the software raid on the rest of the disk. Or maybe I can figure out how to get grub working. Once again I’m reminded of “Three Dead Trolls In a Baggie” singing “yeah, but I’ve got a girl friend and things to get done”.
Day 4:
Reinstalled the Adaptec RAID card, and set up a hardware RAID-1
Partitioned the “drive” with three partitions, one 4G ext3 for /, one 1G swap, and the rest as a physical volume for a lvm.
Installed on /, and when it went to reboot it got to “shutting down md0” and then hung. Will have to check that again. But at least it installed Grub instead of LILO.
After it booted, tried the “reboot” command and it worked! Yay!
Installed smartmontools, but discovered (once again) that it doesn’t work with the raid controller, so uninstalled it. I need to find if there is some other way to monitor the raid controller. I think I tried the dpt_i20 thing before and it didn’t work.
Day 5:
Installed sshd, copied the configuration from the backup to only allow public key logins. (Bite it, password guessers)
Installed munin-node
Installed linux-image-2.6-xen-amd64 and xen-hypervisor-3.2-1-amd64
Rebooted and the damn thing spewed tons of errors and hung. Tried to reboot with the old kernel (that worked before) and I got the same errors. I guess it’s time to give up on that hardware RAID again.
Day 6
Ran the disk “verify” tool in the raid card, and it didn’t find any errors.
Anything I tried to boot the system (the original kernel that worked before, single user mode) still failed in aacraid.
Ripped out the raid card again, and installed with /, /boot, /var and swap as primary partitions, and the rest of the space on both drives as a software RAID-1 used as a physical volume for LVM.
Install openssh-server (and unselect xauth). Copy /etc/ssh/sshd_config and /root/.ssh from backup.
Install smartmontools and enable it in /etc/default/smartmontoolsctl.
Install munin-node.
Rebooted to make sure everything starts correctly.
Installed linux-image-2.6-xen-amd64 and xen-hypervisor-3.2-1-amd64
Reboot again.
Ok, it booted, but “xm list” isn’t up.
Manually start xend and “xm list” is working.
Rebooted, and this time “xm list” is working.
Started to create the lvm logical volumes for the domUs
Day 7:
Discovered that when I backed up the last nearly successful domU, I forgot to back up the boot partition, so I’m on my own for the grub configuration.
Untarred my backups of the “xen2” and “xen3” domUs. Got a bunch of kernel messages about kjournald being blocked for more than X number of seconds while that was going on – I assume that’s because I was running up load averages in 7 and 8 range in the dom0, which is probably not a normal thing. I hope that just because things weren’t written to the journal immediately that doesn’t mean they were written wrong, only that I might have been in danger if things had died in the middle.
Installed rsync so I can restore my backup of the “xen1” domU.
Installed vim and removed vim-tiny
Restored backup with rsync --delete -aSurvx --numeric-ids /mnt/usb0/xen1/Sun/ /mnt/xen1/
Copy the amd64 kernel modules to the domU’s /lib/modules. cp -rp /lib/modules/2.6.26-2-xen-amd64 /mnt/xen1/lib/modules Must remember to exclude /lib/modules when I do any final rsyncing from the live domUs.
DAMMIT! It appears that I made /var too small again. Once it saves /var/lib/xen/save in it, the file system is full. Need to move things around again.
Booted into rescue mode, and moved things around. Everything seems to work now.
