Category: Revelation

(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.

Today was the last race of the season, the Long Lake Long Boat Regatta. 10 miles on beautiful Long Lake in the Adirondaks. The wifi in my motel is really flakey so I’m posting this from my Pre, which seems better able to deal with drop outs than my laptop. So uploading pictures and gps tracks will have to wait until I get home. (Ok, turns out that the Pre couldn’t handle it, so I’m finishing it from home.)

The start was the usual confused mess. My heart rate monitor was wonking out, but even when it wasn’t showing impossible values like 240bpm, it was showing values that were higher than I planned. Early on, Mike was riding the left wake on a C4 and I was on his left wake, but moments later, I was on the right wash of the C4, Mike was on its stern, and Bill was on the right. I can’t remember exactly how that happened. Steve B was about 50 metres ahead of us. I risked a quick glance back and it looked like every kayak in the race was trying to ride my wake. I’m pretty sure Scott S, the guy who’d given me the Thunderbolt, was there.

The C4 guys were talking to each other, and they said they were going to do something with a Hawaiian sounding name after the next “Hup” (multi-person canoes switch sides when the stern paddler yells “Hup”), so I knew something was up. Sure enough, they put on a burst of speed. I hung with them, but by the time they slowed back down, we’d gapped everybody, including Mike and Bill. We got a bit closer to Steve B, but we were still 25 metres of so from him, and I don’t think we got any closer the whole way to the turning point. I stayed with them, getting some small ride from their wake, but mostly just keeping pace with them. I’d sort of figured out the rhythm, so every time they would “Hup” onto one side I’d turn my boat a little to the left, and then when they’d “Hup” to the other side, I’d turn the boat to the right. At one point, one of them thanked me for setting a good pace, and I told them that I thought they’d been setting the pace. My heart rate monitor was still showing me in the mid 160s, which is higher than I thought I could maintain, but I still felt strong.

As we got closer to the boat we were to turn around, the C4 was pushing me to the right. I said to them “You’re supposed to go to the left of that boat”, but they continued to push right, so I dropped behind them and came up the other side. I was surprised to see how much room they needed around the corner, and how much speed they lost – I think of my boat as being a lousy turner, but I got inside them on the turn again, and ended up back on their right side again. But we were now facing into the wind, and they were slowing down. I saw that Steve B and Mike were now hard up against the left shore with had some tiny bit of shelter from the wind, and we were just about level with Steve and maybe 10 or 20 metres in front of Mike. The C4 guys were doing a bit of talk to try to encourage each other, and included me in it, which was kind of fun. But as one of them said, we were half way done and I was only one third tired, so it was time to put on some speed. I passed the C4, and once I was clear of them I headed to the shore.

I was a bit behind Steve, but with the burst of speed I’d put on to leave the C4 I was catching him. I got into his wake, and recovered a bit and then surged ahead. Just as I got into position to pull Steve, I heard Steve say something to Mike. I didn’t realize it until afterwards, but Mike had buried himself to bridge up to us. And evidently Steve’s time alone there was starting to tell on him too. After a while, I looked back and it looked like Mike was riding my wake, but we’d gapped Steve. Mike made a couple of valiant efforts to come up along me and take a turn leading, but he just didn’t have it. I told him not to worry, I didn’t mind leading as long as I was feeling strong. With about 2 miles or so to go, he finally recovered enough to come up alongside, and I rode him for a few minutes to recover, but mostly we paddled together. There wasn’t anybody up ahead close enough to try to catch, and nobody behind who looked like they were going to catch us, so we set a good pace and enjoyed ten minutes of not worrying about our place. It was fun.

Mike pointed out a dock ahead, and said “after that dock, we’ll sort it out”, meaning that we were going to start our finish sprint at that point. But before we even got there, he raised our speed about 0.2 mph. And then we both realized that dock was further from the finish than we’d thought, and neither of us was going to be able to keep it up all the way to the finish. We both dropped our speed back down a bit, but not all the way. We were pretty much even until this float plane started his take-off run right beside us. The wake hit me hard and I had to stop paddling and brace like hell to avoid dumping, but Mike, who is a lot more comfortable in his EFT than I am in my Thunderbolt, kept paddling. Mike ended up beating me by 5 seconds. Steve was evidently a few metres behind us, and the wake from the float plane ended up dumping him.

Mike ended up winning the Touring class. I was 6th in Unlimited. I was really happy with my performance, and even happier that I could play a part in helping Mike get the win.