Category: Rant

Update: I posted an update to this review here.

Summary: If I were you, I’d hold off buying it until they can work out some of the problems.

So they started talking about the Motionize device last year some time, and I was really excited. The idea was that it would put sensors on your boat and paddle and a phone app that would tell you exactly what your paddle stroke was doing, and give you advice on how to make it better. Sort of like an extra pair of “eyes” on your technique. But the device they announced as the first product was an all-singing, all-dancing do-everything monster device with built in phone charging, bluetooth speakers, all in a massive case that you’d somehow have to lash down to your kayak or surfski. And because it attempted to do everything, it cost way too much. It seemed like something you’d want to buy as a club and pass around from paddler to paddler to get some feedback, go off and work on it, and then borrow it back every few weeks to see how you were improving. A few months ago, they announced a stripped down version called the “Paddle Edge” – it just had the sensors, and a mount that you could put your phone into, but it would be up to you to provide a waterproof case for your phone and keep it charged up. And so not only did it fit better on a surfski, it also fit better in your budget. I jumped at the chance.

I’ve been paddling with it for a few weeks, and while it does offer some good advice and coaching, I have a few complaints that I feel really need to be addressed.

• Probably the most important complaint is that the app freezes up. Probably 25% of the time, it freezes soon after I get on the water. If I’m lucky, I’m in a position to return to the dock and get out and fiddle with the phone to kill the app and restart it, but sometimes I just end up paddling with a useless frozen display staring at me for the whole session.
• The thing will chew down your phone battery in no time flat. I find the most interesting screen is the one that shows a “top view” of your paddle travelling through the water in real time, indicating if your catch or withdrawal is outside of the recommended zone. But that screen will completely drain my phone’s battery – today it went from 85% to 5% in 75 minutes. This ranks right up there with the freezing problem as reason not to buy until they do something about it.
• The display of where your paddle goes in and out of the water is really sensitive to boat tilt and other factors. I was doing intervals today up and down the canal and every time I did a 180 degree turn the display would show my paddle moving at 90 degrees to the boat right through the middle of the cockpit for hundreds of meters beyond the turn. At other times it would show one side going way too long and the other side way too short – I suspect the boat might have tilted a bit and it got confused about where the waterline is. This really cut into the usefulness of the info it gave me.
• The device is capable of giving you a lot of information, but there isn’t much room on the screen. It would be really useful if, like a Garmin Forerunner, it could be configured to automatically cycle between two or three screens with more information on them (but not the map – I never need to see that). It would also be useful if there were a way to review some of the info afterwards. The summary you get on iOS is pretty minimal. I’ve seen what other people get on the Android version of the app and it’s better, but still not perfect.
• Some of the coaching information it gives you is obviously not based on any sensor info – like when it tells you to remember to hydrate. The thing is, I don’t know if some of the other advice it gives you is somehow determined from sensors or not, like when it tells you to look forward rather than down or when it tells you to rotate at the hips. It should probably have some sort of indication which is which – even a simple color code would be helpful.
• The push button on the paddle sensor is supposed to switch screens, and also if you double tap it it’s supposed to start or end a session. Switching screens works most of the time but not all the time, double tapping to pause and end a session works less than half the time, and I’ve never gotten double tapping to start a session to work.
• When I was setting it up, I clicked the “Connect to Garmin” button, not realizing that was only for the Fenix not for the Forerunner 920XT, and now every time I startup the app it tries to connect to the ConnectIQ store to download something, only to tell me it’s not available for the 920XT. I haven’t figured out how to make it stop doing that.
• Not really their fault, but I find it hard to see the screen in direct sunlight. I don’t know if it would help, but an option in the app to change it from white text on a dark background to dark text on a light background might help.

Not related to the list of complaints, but I needed to put my water bag under the front bungies on Friday, and when I tried to move the phone mount out of the way I overstressed the mount and broke it. I bought a more robust RAM suction mount and this thing looks bombproof. Highly recommended.

Also not a complaint, but a recommendation to Motionize: you guys should put a link on your page so people can order more of those sticky mounts to they can move the sensors to their other boats and paddles.

The thing is, I really want this thing to work for me, and for everybody else who bought them. So I’m making this offer to anybody from Motionize who wants to fix this issues – I’m willing to do anything you need to help. I could film the screen when it’s doing weird stuff (like it did today when I was doing 180 degree turns). I could install a debug version of the app to help you collect information – I’ve installed beta apps with mobile provisioning files before, so I’m familiar with the process. I could file bug reports or talk with your developers. Let me know what I can do to help.

After ruining two of my three cameras out west, I thought I’d get a camera that’s waterproof and doesn’t require any hacking to get a battery life that will last for a whole race, even a relatively long one. That search led me to the Contour ROAM3, which is actually marked down to $90 on Amazon these days. It’s a pretty simple 1080p camera, nothing fancy, but it’s waterproof and advertises 3-3.5 hours battery life. It’s very much like my late lamented Polaroid XS100, except with much better battery life. Just like the XS100, you can’t see what you’ve recorded until you pop the SD card out and put it into a computer – no wifi and no app like the GoPro and GeekPro have. And because there is no display, not even a little one, the only way to know what is going on is via a couple of cryptic icons and very cryptic beep signals. One very odd feature is it has a little laser beam to help you line it up. I’m not sure how useful that is since the only way to turn it on also appears to put it into photo mode. Like the XS100, it has a standard tripod mount as well as a proprietary mount. I also bought a “hat mount” for a few bucks which allows you to attach it to a baseball style hat.

Today we were doing a killer workout on the bay – 1 minute on, 30 seconds off, repeated 32 times with longer rests every 8. It seemed like a good opportunity to try it out.

You can’t see it from this part of the clip, but it did a pretty good handling changing light conditions, like going under a low bridge or into shadow. I liked the picture quality. I really wish it has a 1080p/60fps mode like my GoPro did – I think that made action a lot smoother looking, but I can hardly complain for the price. I didn’t much like the hat mount – the sides of my head don’t go straight up and down and so the camera ended up slightly off square. I think I’d prefer a proper headband mount like I had for my GoPro. Also the video shows that it doesn’t handle wind noise all that well when pointed straight into it. It actually was a lot better on the downwind part of the recording. Compare with the GoPro which hardly catches any sound at all when in the waterproof case.

Bottom line:
The GoPro has better picture quality and a much bigger ecosystem of accessories. But if adding a third party extended battery is going to cause the waterproof case to leak and ruin the camera, then I can’t afford it. Since I haven’t found another action camera with 3 hours of battery life, I guess this is going to be it until somebody makes a better one.

If you’re reading this, action camera makers, how about coming out with a waterproof camera that shoots 4K at 30fps (or even better, 60fps) and 1080p/60fps and with a battery that lasts 3+ hours? Yeah, and if you can bring that in under $200, that’d be great too. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

I’m writing this the day after race day because I was too demoralized and tired to write it on the day.

Friday was declared to be race day. The race organizer described the predicted wind conditions as “nuclear” and far bigger than anything we’d seen so far. I had signed up for the long 14 mile race back when I actually had confidence in my abilities, and I briefly considered changing to the 8 mile short course after evaluating my pathetic abilities and the forecast, but as Carter Johnson the race organizer said when I wondered if it would be too “gnarly” for me to do the full race, the “gnar” actually starts after the short course start.

Driving out to the start, it was cool and overcast, which are not conducive to making big waves, but what I saw on the river was already pretty gnarly. Not just in the famous “Swell City”, but also in the early parts of the race.

Brief note about geography here. All the runs I’ve done all week have started at Viento on the Oregon side of the river. Viento is pretty close to the top of Swell City, which is mostly on the Washington side. It’s also at a bend in the river – that’s probably what spawns Swell City as the wind goes around the bend. The short course race started on the Washington side of the river at Drano Lake, which is less than a kilometer downwind from Viento, but at the top of Swell City. The long race started at Home Valley, also on the Washington side. Conventional wisdom is that the Oregon side is more benign, especially from Viento to the finish.

At the start, we had to head out perpendicular to the river flow to a hot spot buoy that was most of the way to the Oregon side. I didn’t start hard, and by the time I reached the hot spot I was already nearly in last place. There were some faces I recognized near me and I kept thinking I could catch them and stay with them, but it never happened.

After the turn, I was catching some big stuff. I still don’t understand why but even when I was catching runs I just couldn’t seem to close the gap on anybody. It was discouraging. But worse was that every time I stalled out on a wave with water pouring into my cockpit, yet another person would come cruising by. And as I went on I seemed to be spending more time stalled or bracing for my life and less time linking runs. That’s not to say I wasn’t. There were some memorable long links that almost made it fun. At one point I was on this gigantic wave and I was braking with all my might, but I couldn’t help it and my bow slammed into the wave in front. I was thinking “I hope my camera caught that look of fear just before the camera bent down”, but reviewing the footage afterwards revealed that the camera had already bent on a previous wave so it didn’t catch anything. It was also while I was in that wave that I saw a guy remounting his boat. You’re supposed to offer aid in a situation like that, but I was barely keeping myself upright and I wasn’t going to be any help to anybody else.

So now I’m sore, I’m not having fun and I’m pretty sure that if it continues on this way I’m going to be too tired and miss strokes and fall in a bunch. I’m also pretty sure I’m in last place with the possible exception of the guy who fell in, although the sweep boat isn’t in my peripheral vision. Bailing out at Drano is looking like a good option. There is a bus waiting at Drano to pick up stragglers and as a consolation prize Carter had announced that anybody who abandoned at Drano would receive five beer tickets as a consolation. 

But just before Viento there is a large channel marker in the water, and right there the water calmed down considerably. I’m paddling fine, catching small runs and cruising along nicely. And I’m presented with a dilemma. I can see that it’s still pretty gnarly in the middle of the river, and I have no way to know what’s going to happen when the river bends at Viento. If it stays like what I’m in now, I have a chance of finishing and maybe even clawing my way out of last place. If what I’m seeing in the middle is what I’m going to be in around the bend, I’m going to be in trouble – there is really no place to abandon other than Drano. Abandoning at Viento would be easier, but there is no bus waiting there and I’d have to hitch hike back to the finish in soaking wet clothes.

So I made the hard decision and left the benign easy waves on the Oregon shore and headed diagonally across the waves towards Drano. And man I was glad for all the time I’ve spent in Irondequoit Bay this year because it was pretty confused in there. Big waves coming from two or three angles – I attempted to catch runs on some of the ones that were headed in the right direction, with some small success. It was hard going, but not as hard as earlier. The decision to abandon was getting both harder and easier. As I got near the entrance to the lake, the sweep boat came along side and asked if I was ok. I told him what I was doing. I didn’t realize until I was nearly at the boat ramp that he’d followed me in. He yelled to the bus driver who came down to help me carry the boat that I was the last one, and he could leave. But then he came back and said that there was one more. But that guy came in through the entrance to the lake, landed on the shore some distance before the boat ramp, and then paddled back out. I think he was approached by a fishing boat during that. I heard afterwards from one of the paddlers I met last week that he’d seen somebody on the course who was having trouble with the lock on his paddle – maybe he just needed a wrench or some duct tape to secure it?

So the bus took me (and only me – it’s pretty discouraging to realize you’re the only abandoner in the whole race) back to the start, I retrieved my car and headed to the finish. Driving down I could only see four or five boats still on the course. I retrieved my five beer tickets and proceeded to drown my sorrows (actually I had two or three and attempted to give away the rest, but only got one taker – you probably wouldn’t be surprised to find out that many top paddlers don’t drink, and I was so late to the show that most people had already hit their limit). 

At the finish, everybody was complaining – not about the big stuff that knocked the shit out of me, but about the fact that the wind died and the stuff I liked around Viento continued all the way to the finish. “Just a long up river grind” as one person described it. But I’m good at long grinds – it’s one of my strengths. If only I’d known.

So here I am, sore, tired and very discouraged. The thought that maybe I’m not cut out to be a real surfskier is high in my mind. On the other hand, most of the people I talked to there are far more experienced on waves than I am. I tend to think that because I’ve gone to Tarifa and had clinics with top names that I’m hot shit, but there really isn’t any substitute for experience. The way I see it, either I need to accept my limitations and stick with what I’m good at, or somehow get more experience in this big stuff. I wonder how Vicki would feel about retiring to North Vancouver?