Category: Revelation

As the 2014 kayaking season winds down, it seems like a good time to look back and forward.

First of all, the best news of all: my shoulder, while sometimes a little sore, no longer seems like it’s limiting my paddling. I have to take care of it, and I’ve adjusted my technique and my training to be more gentle on it, but these days it seems more sore when I’m not paddling than when I am.

Other highlights of this year:

• Paddled 1516 kilometers (942 miles) so far this calendar year.
• Set personal records in the Baycreek Wednesday Night Time Trial (smashing my previous best of 18:54 by going 17:36 on my first outing of the season), the Erie Canal Regatta (average pace is 0.5km/hr faster than last year), and just about every other race I did this year.
• Participated in the Lighthouse to Lighthouse (L2L) race (the Eastern US Surf Ski Championships), my longest race so far (21.5km/13.4miles) and my first salt water race.
• Participated in the TC Surfski Immersion Weekend and a clinic with Oscar Chalupski, which added to my week in Tarifa last year means I’m getting really confident in the waves.
• Got a really beautiful new boat, a 2014 Epic V10 Sport Ultra. My old V10 Sport is sitting there lonely and unused – this one is lighter, fits better, and has a closable scupper drain, so what’s not to love?

Next year, I’m looking forward to more of the same. I’d like to get a bit faster on the flat, but what I really want is to get better in the waves. At L2L and other times I’ve noticed my speed drops way off when I’m getting hit by waves from two directions at once. So I guess I need to spend a bit more time in Irondequiot Bay, because that’s the best place in town to be constantly battered by boat wakes from every direction at once. And the reason I want to get better in the waves is that I want to do more ocean racing. I definitely plan to go back to L2L and hopefully break the top 25 this time. I also want to try the Blackburn Challenge, which is even longer (33km/20miles) and might present more wave and wake challenges.

I’m also planning to go back to the TC Surfski Immersion weekend. Unfortunately it looks like the finances won’t stretch to a trip to Tarifa.

Mike and I are talking about doing some doubles paddling. He has an ancient and heavy K2 kayak which he suggests we paddle and race and see how we get on, and if that works out, we should look to buy a double surf ski. Much as I’d like to support Baycreek, my local kayak shop and Epic dealer, the Epic V10 Double is both heavier and more expensive than the Stellar S2E, so we’re thinking of getting one of those from the dealer down in Ithaca, unless we can find something used on surfskiracing.org. I’ve seen a couple of likely ones there already, but unfortunately the price to ship them is upwards of $500 which makes a new one more enticing.

Last year at this race, Dan and Steve and I had started out together and then Dan and I had clashed our paddles together, Dan had dumped, Steve had briefly stopped to see if he was ok, and so my victory over them was tainted. I was determined not to let that happen again. I was going to beat them fair and square. Last year’s first and second place winners had stayed home, so our only other rival was Alan from Ithaca, the guy in the sprint boat who, at Armond Basset this year, had started off with Jim and blown up, and I’d passed him about 5 or 6 kilometers into it. I was hoping he’d do the same at this race.

Unlike last year’s Erie Canal Regatta, I was paddling my V10 Sport. It’s certainly lighter than my Think Legend, but the Legend is longer and narrower and possibly a little faster on flat water. I meant to do some side by side time trialling to determine which was faster, but I got busy preparing for Lighthouse to Lighthouse and never put in any time in the Legend. And when I did paddle the Legend, I dropped it on the dock and put a crack in it. So it’s off getting fixed, so like it or not, I was in the V10 Sport, paddling against two guys in V12s and one guy in an ICF sprint boat.

Unlike last year, we started upstream. As expected, Alan took off and opened a large gap. Dan said “just paddle smooth”, as per our game plan. Steve hung on Dan’s stern wash and contributed nothing while Dan and I swapped leads, being extremely careful not to clash paddles. We both picked up a leaf or two, but were able to bounce them off. We weren’t really gaining on Alan, but after the first kilometer I don’t think we were losing much either.

As we got close to the first turn, it looked like Alan wasn’t going to turn – we yelled to him and he apparently heard, because he turned around the “dolphin” (a term for those wooden pilings in the water that apparently I’m the only person who knows it) in the opposite direction (ccw) than we were set up for (cw), but he had enough of a lead that it didn’t cause a conflict. As we turned, I could see we’d completely dropped Steve – he was a dozen or more boat lengths behind. And we were hammering. Or rather I was hammering and Dan was hanging on. His turns in front were getting shorter and at one point he called out his heart rate at 165 while mine was 155. But I didn’t slack off because I really wanted to catch Alan. We did a few sub-5-minute kilometers and I could tell Dan wasn’t going to be able to hang on. I asked him if he had one more pull in him and he pulled for a few minutes, but then he dropped back onto my wake. The nice thing to do at that point would have been to slow down enough that Dan could catch his breath without slowing down too much so that we got caught. But I had the fire in my blood and my sights on that sprint boat, and it was getting closer and closer. And at about the 6.5 kilometer mark, Dan dropped off my wake and I was on my own.

As we reached the downstream marker bouy for the turn upriver, I was a about a boat length behind. Then he did a better job at turning, and so opened the gap up to three boat lengths. I clawed my way back, but just as I got into his wake, I got a leaf on my bow. Now a leaf in the bow is a constant hazard in the canal, especially in the fall, and it’s a very bad thing. A leaf on the can cost you a half a kilometer per hour at worst. Get a bunch, and it can be a full kilometer per hour. Get one on your rudder and it’s twice as bad, but thanks to Todd’s weed guard I haven’t had a problem with leaves on my rudder in a few weeks. Sometimes you can bounce the boat to shake off a leaf, sometimes you can knock them off by deliberately hitting a floating stick, and sometimes a boat wake will knock them off, but sometimes the only way to get them off is to backpaddle, which is not something you want to do in a race. Evidently this was one of those times. I tried numerous bounces, and we did hit a boat wake or two, but that leaf stayed stubbornly on my bow. And every time I left Alan’s wake to try to pass him, it felt like I’d opened a parachute. So I just stayed tucked into his stern wash. His speed kept going up and down – if his intention had been to drop me, it nearly worked. But I had seen similar variations in his speed when I’d been chasing him down river – it would seem like I wasn’t making any ground for a few minutes, and then I’d be catching him for a few minutes, and then he’d be back up around the same speed as me and so on. I found out afterwards that he doesn’t have a GPS and he’s just not very good at pacing himself when there’s nobody around him.

The problem with staying in his wake is that he was going straight up the middle of the canal – on my own, I would have been tucked in closer to the edges where the current isn’t as strong, and there might have been opportunities to find a floating twig or something to knock that damn leaf off. But it wasn’t to be – even when a boat came in the opposite direction, instead of moving closer into shore, he went out to the other side of the canal to let the boat by. And unlike many people you see paddling ICF boats, he didn’t get thrown off his stroke by the boat wakes, so my other hope, that I’d be able to pull past him, didn’t happen either.

I stuck in his wake up until the town of Fairport, but I knew that eventually I’d have to make some sort of move to pass him. At the Parker Street bridge I tried to pull out, but the leaf caused the brakes to come on, so I pulled back in. Then approaching the lift bridge I realized I was running out of time so I pulled out. And it was awful – I just didn’t have anything left. Instead of pulling up onto his side wake and challenging him for the win, I ended up losing a boat length or two. He got a well deserved win, and I got a pretty satisfactory second place. But I can’t help but think that without that leaf, I might have been able to do it.

Last year, on a slightly different, slightly longer course, but a possibly faster boat, I’d averaged 10.7km/hr or 5:36 min/km, and this year, in what was objectively the slowest boat of the top 4 finishers, I averaged 11.2km/hr or 5:21 min/km. And that’s something to be happy with.

I forgot to mention this in my previous posts about the Lighthouse to Lighthouse race.

On Friday, we arrived at the hotel around 3:30 or so. There were two other cars with v-racks and surf skis on top, one with Pennsylvania plates with two “Goodboy” racks and the other with one Goodboy rack and one KayakPro rack. Mike’s car has one Goodboy rack and one of John Eberhardt’s not-as-good-as-the-original-but-passable clones of the Goodboy rack.

As an aside, I should mention that Mike’s Goodboy rack is a result of a deal I worked out with the Mr. Goodboy himself, Cliff Roach, where I took a bunch of orders and he sent them all to me, I assembled them and distributed them to Rochester paddlers. I brought 6 racks, including my own. Unfortunately my rack got stolen, so now I have my Eberhardt clone rack and a KayakPro rack I bought because I don’t like the Eberhardt one much.

So anybody, a guy walks over and he’s looking intently at Mike’s racks. I notice he’s wearing a “Keystone Kayaks” t-shirt, and I remember that it used to be the only web presence for Goodboy racks was on the Keystone Kayak’s web site, so I asked him if he was Cliff Roach, and he was. Considering we’re rocking a clone of his intellectual property on our roof… awkward.

He asks us why we cut off the curved bit of his rack, and I explained it was a clone of his design by a guy who didn’t have the resources to bend the aluminum. I quickly reminded him of my group order, and explained how Eberhardt made this clone after my Goodboy rack got stolen, and I hope that mollified him.

Photos by Daniel Marino, http://danmarinophoto.com

Mike and I did the Lighthouse To Lighthouse race this weekend, and it was a doozy. The most salient features making it “a doozy” are:

• My first ocean race
• 14 miles long, my longest race so far
• The Eastern US surf ski championships
• A metric butt-load of surf skis. I believe they were saying 88, in all the classes. This is as well as rowing craft, outrigger canoes, sea kayaks, SUPs and some weirder stuff.

The things that made me think this could not only be “do-able”, but also that I could possibly do well:

• Being Long Island Sound rather than open ocean meant it was probably going to be small waves and lots of boat wakes, something I can regularly train on here in Rochester
• Mike and I had done a number of very long training paddles on Lake Ontario, making me feel confident in my ability to last for 14 miles
• As I was tapering down my mileage last week I took a number of paddles in Irodequoit Bay, which is shallow and heavily travelled by boats, making it prime breeding ground for that mish-mash of boat wakes that Mike refers to as “potato patch” and I used to refer to as “I hate this I hate this I hate this I hate this please let it be over”, and I felt like I was getting pretty good at handling that stuff.

I spent the week before the race obsessively checking the marine forecast for Norwalk CT for race day. Every time I checked, it said the water was going to be nice and warm, the waves were going to be less than 1 foot high, and the wind was going to be either from the south west or from the north west at about 5 to 10 knots. I liked either of those options – south west would give us a head wind out and a nice push on the way back, north west would mean the wind was coming across the islands and wouldn’t be generating any waves at all. What I sort of realized but not quite was that with only 1 foot waves, they wouldn’t dominate over the boat wakes, so the whole race would be spent in “potato patch” waters.

So anyway, Mike and I discussed strategy. We paddle together a lot and most of the time I’m a stronger paddler than him, so my strategy was to try and find a wake I could ride, and his strategy was to try and hold onto me and if not find somebody else. Because I paddle against the people I paddle against rather than against the best people on the east coast, I had the idea in my head that I’m probably one of the top people in the V10 Sport surf ski, so my intention was to find one of them and try to hold onto them.

At the start we had about a 250 meter straight downwind, then a bouy to turn at, and then head out behind Sprite Island and straight to Pecks Ledge Light, the first of the lighthouses in the race’s name. Then it’s on a curving line past a bunch of low islands and around the second lighthouse, Greensledge Light, and back along the same islands and back in the way we came.

Before the start, somebody at the start pointed out a real “gotcha” about the course – on the way back, it’s easy to not see Goose Island because it’s very low and silhouetted against an island that’s beyond the course, Cockenoe Island, and you will see Peck’s Ledge Light and think you can head directly to it, but if you do you’ll end up going in behind Goose Island (and maybe even Copps Island) and get disqualified. I’m glad he did, because I nearly got suckered.

While we were warming up, Mike pointed out that the start line was very wide, and if we lined up to the right hand side, we’d have a tiny bit longer way to the first bouy, but we’d have the full advantage of the wind and waves to our back. It was a smart move, because nearly everybody else lined up to the left side, and when we got to the bouy everybody had already fallen into three very distinct lines and it was easy to squeeze into place in what looked like a good spot.

After the bouy, I ended up on the tail of a guy in a black V10 Sport Elite. (That’s the more expensive and lighter version of my V10 Sport Ultra. I don’t even think Epic offers the Elite model any more.) I thought he’s a guy to try to stick with. Unfortunately as we got out from behind Sprite Island the chop started hitting us from every direction and I was finding it harder and harder to hold onto his wake. I lost it maybe a half of the way from Sprite Island to the lighthouse, about the 2km mark (spoiler alert – I found out afterwards his name is Mario Blackburn and he finished 8 minutes ahead of me.) I was going way faster than I probably should have, and my heart rate was up in the 160s which is higher than I can maintain for 14 miles. I tried to find some other skis whose wakes I could hold onto and by the 3km mark I thought I had somebody. There was a loose aglomeration of 4 skis ahead of us, but we were catching them and none of them were using each other’s wakes. But as we went around Goose Island we suddenly got the full brunt of the wind in our faces. I don’t know why the guy I was following didn’t seem to be affected by it, but he dropped us all hard and went charging up the middle of the 4 guys. I found myself side by side with the second of the four guys, with one guy just tantalizingly out of reach ahead. Around this time I saw Jim Mallory and his doubles partner coming back, in a comfortable lead in the double surfski class, and then a few minutes behind the first of the single surf skis, a Fenn.

After we passed Southwest Point, it’s almost 2km of open water between you and the lighthouse, and another 2km back, with no islands sheltering you from shit coming in from the right, and it gets considerably rougher. The tantalizing guy dumped at least twice and did quick remounts. Mike thinks we passed him at this point, but I don’t think I did. All I know for sure is that the guy I was beside surged ahead, and I slowed down in the rough stuff. Just before turning at the lighthouse, I felt a familiar bump on the back of my boat and Mike called out.

I’d forgotten that in that really ugly stuff, Mike does not slow down as much as I did and I guess he used the opportunity to close back in on me. Mad props to him for keeping close enough in the semi-messy stuff that he could close in completely in the really messy stuff. Rounding the lighthouse, he actually went ahead of me. But then we came out from behind the lighthouse and now I was in my element. There were little waves coming from almost straight behind us, and with my lighter boat and slightly more power, I could get on those and surf them better than Mike, and pull away.

I had purposely taken a line out to the right hand side to take full advantage of both wind and tide behind us, but very few other people where doing that. I could see a big line of people tucked in closer to the lee of the islands. I couldn’t see if we were faster or slower than them, but I wish the race had taken split times at the turn so I could figure it out.

I don’t actually know how much I’d gotten ahead of Mike. In my head I was imagining that I was leaving him far behind. But the fact that we were now going with the wind meant that there was no cooling breeze, and I was cooking in the heat. I started to fade again, and it was getting harder and harder to put on the burst of energy you needed to catch one of these tiny waves.

As I passed Goose Island, I heard Mike calling from not very far behind a question about the course – it was easy to think that we were supposed to go around Cockenoe Island, but I could see a line of paddlers ahead of me going direct to the lighthouse and behind to Sprite Island and the finish, so I called back to go direct to the lighthouse. But the fact that it was obvious I hadn’t left Mike far behind, or he’d managed to claw his way back to within earshot was slightly dispiriting to me, but man I’ve got to give him full credit for that. Near the lighthouse, I again saw that same guy who’d dumped two or more times ahead of me at the Greensledge Light. This time when he dumped his remount wasn’t as fast as it had been before and I managed to pass him.

After the lighthouse, it was full on “potato patch” again, waves from every direction, including a boat towing kids on a raft who made a gigantic wake right in front of me. However, I had enough energy left that I sprinted over the wake and successfully caught the other side of their wake, which pushed me ahead of the guy in the red Stellar who I’d been chasing for a while (Mark Southam). One thing I noticed at the time and was curious about, everybody else was taking a curving path to the right instead of going straight to Sprite Island. I went straight and didn’t encounter any obstacles that made me think this was a bad idea. I notice now looking at the GPS track that we evidently took that curving track on the way out as well. No idea why, unless people were allowing themselves to be pushed by the wind.

Rounding Sprite Island, I realized that I no longer needed the energy I’d saved to handle the waves, and so I went into an all out sprint. I knew that people who’d been ahead of me for the first 12 or 13 miles of the race were not that far behind me and I didn’t want to give them a chance to catch back up. Looking at my GPS tracks again, you can see my heart rate respond to the extra effort by jumping up to 155 or so, but not much change in my speed as it barely touches 10km/hr, but then again that section was more directly into the wind.

Crossing the line, I finally managed to look back and see that while Mike hadn’t caught the guy in the red Stellar, he was involved in a neck and neck battle with the guy who kept remounting. In the end, I finished in 2:17:15 in 31st position, the red Stellar finished 32nd, and Mike barely nipped the remount guy finishing 2:17:52 in 33rd, and remount guy (Jeff Cowley) finished two seconds behind him.

So, what’s the upshot? Am I satisfied? Yeah, I guess I am. I paddled a good race in trying conditions in an environment that was a bit different than I’m used to, and did as well as could be expected against a very high quality field. And I’m hoping to come back next year and go better.

My goal of being one of the top V10 Sports was sort-of met – I was the 4th V10 Sport, but I was a whole 17 minutes behind the fastest one. Surprisingly, the guy in the lightest V10 Sport, the black one, was only 8 minutes ahead of me. Maybe I should have tried harder to hold his wake? But then again, three of the guys in the SS-20 category (the category invented for Epic V8 and Stellar S18 but specifically excluding V10 Sport) were faster than me as well. So maybe it’s not all about the boat.

One thing that jumps out at me about the results though – one of the SUP paddlers supposedly beat my time. Either that is one hell of a SUP paddler, or there’s something wrong there. I’ve never met a SUP paddler who could hold even close to the same speed as me, and this guy did 14 miles in 2:13:30, for an average speed of 6.3mph! The second fastest SUP was 56 minutes slower.

I also discovered that just like in Tarifa, handle bar tape and salt water do not mix. I’ve got lots of new blisters on my right hand. I was using handle bar tape, but it tore my left hand apart in Tarifa. So I switched to no tape and cycling gloves, but that made my right hand numb, so I switched back to tape on my right hand and a glove on my left hand. It may have looked silly, but it worked just fine in fresh water, but evidently it doesn’t work in salt water. I’ve got to keep experimenting. I guess I could try no tape and no glove on the right next.