Rants and Revelations – Page 28 – Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.

USCA Nationals

Today I paddled the USCA National Championships marathon class in Northfield Massachusetts. I wasn’t originally going to do it, but after DNFing at the Gorge Downwind Championships and then finding out that I’m going to have to have carpal tunnel surgery in October, I figured I needed to do every race I could get my hands on this fall just in case next year is a wash-out.

I found a video online showing the course. It was up and down a river, so it was nice and flat, although a bit shallow and weedy. I could easily have managed it in my V12, but I’m still not convinced I’m any faster in the V12 than in the V10 Sport. Plus I have a very short rudder for the V10 Sport, and I haven’t paddled the V12 since I got back from out west. So I decided to paddle the Sport.

One odd “feature” of this race is that the K1 Unlimited class races on Friday. Most of my races are on weekends, but they’ve got a full calendar on this event, with sprint races on Thursday and other class races on Saturday and Sunday.

Another “feature” is that you have to be a member of USCA. Since I had no reason to join USCA other than this race, that makes this race really expensive for what it is.

Now there are at least two places on the website where it says that if you want to register, you either have to pre-register by mail before July 25th, or you have to register the day before the race before 6pm. Well, I didn’t make the decision to go until after the July 25th deadline, so I resigned myself to coming up early enough on Thursday to register. But then on Facebook, they said: “oh no, it doesn’t say that you can’t register after July 25th, it says if you pre-register by the 25th, you get a discount”. Well, it does say that in one place, but like I said, there are at least two places where it says the registration must be received by the 25th. But no matter – not the first time I’ve seen a race website that was contradictory and wrong. If they’re saying on Facebook that they’ll accept registrations now, I’m throwing one in the mail. And a couple of days later I got a confirmation that they’d received it. So that meant I could leave later on Thursday.

Once I was registered, it was time to book accommodation. The website for the event had a list of place to stay, but most of them were B&Bs or full houses. There was a motel near the event site, but they were full. So I booked another hotel on the list that was really cheap. And after I booked it, Vicki said: “how are their ratings on TripAdvisor”. Oh, I’d never thought to look. And man, I’m glad I did, because all the ratings were one and two stars, with frequent complaints about boarded up windows and trash. According to those ratings, the place had turned into a shit-hole after they’d put up a bunch of homeless people. (No offence to homeless people, but just parking them in a motel in the middle of nowhere is probably not the best solution for them.) Anyway, I quickly booked a much more expensive but more highly rated hotel. Afterward, I realized that as a single guy traveling alone, an AirBnB might have been a better and cheaper idea. Oh well. I heard some bad stories from people at the event about local AirBnBs as well.

Jim was also going to be here, but he’d come up well in advance. He wanted to paddle in the Sea Kayak class tomorrow, so he had to borrow a V8 from somebody, and that somebody didn’t want to go without his V8 for a whole week, so I ended up bring it up yesterday. Not a problem.

So on to the race. The weather forecast yesterday had said there might be thunderstorms in the morning, but when I woke up that had changed to a chance of thunderstorms in the afternoon. So that was a bullet dodged. It was sunny and hot. Too hot. There was a bit of a breeze running up the river. I found out after the race that there was a hydropower pumping station just downstream of the event and when it’s discharging (like it’s going to do on a hot day when everybody is running their air conditioners), it can actually reverse the local flow of the river. That actually explains some of the things I saw out there because my speed was pretty slow while going ostensibly “downriver” and I didn’t think it was only due to the breeze.

The race itself was pretty well organized. There were a lot of paddlers, so even though they used much narrower age categories than, say, Armond Bassett, unlike Armond Bassett there weren’t only 2 or 3 paddlers in every class. There were 16 people in my age category in unlimited K1. We were in the second start wave (which the announcer insisted on calling “heats” rather than “waves”, which is weird), along with young and fast paddlers and the slightly older than them but younger than us category. So about 50 paddlers on the line in our heat. There was a slight delay in the start as they repositioned one of the downstream turning buoys – it looked from our vantage point that they were moving it more off shore to give some room. The Women’s C1s started in the first wave, and we could watch them head down to the turning buoys about a kilometer downstream. We started before most of them had made their turns.

We headed down and things were pretty chaotic at first. Everybody was trying to find their best group to paddle with and still get around the two downstream buoys with a minimum of banging and barging. And considering the size of the field and the narrowness of the space between the buoys and the shore, I think it went off pretty well. As we turned the second buoy and started the long drag upstream (with a breeze at our back so we were in the still hot air), I found myself on the side wake of a guy with a nice looking Stellar surf ski. There was a guy who I’d noticed before the start, thinking “oh, at least I’ll be able to beat him”, and he was on the Stellar guy’s stern wake. So much for first impressions. I think he was in a V10L. The three of us basically maintained that formation most of the way up the river – Stellar guy and I were side-by-side and so I’d try to take a pull for a while and then I’d drop back and just ride for a while. There was another guy just a few boat lengths ahead of us and when I took my pulls I thought about trying to bridge the gap but I just couldn’t do it. I was maxed out, with heart rates in the low 160s. A few boat lengths ahead of that guy was a large pack of kayakers, including Wesley Echols. I really wish I could have gotten up to that pack because that would have been a good ride.

I was kind of shocked to see Jim heading back when I was at about 4km or so. I figured he must have had a mechanical problem, although he said afterward it was actually a problem with his hand or wrist. He’s been having problems with that recently, so I guess even he is finally feeling the effects of age.

On the way up, we had to go through a narrow channel between an island and the shore, and it was shallow and weedy in there. Stellar guy for some reason decided to try to get in tight to the shore, but I could see big mats of weeds there so I stayed in the middle of the channel, and he soon came back out and rejoined me and the V10L guy.

Not long after the island, Wesley started dropping back. He seemed to stop to backpaddle to get some weeds off, then started out not as fast as he had before. He joined up with the Stellar guy (since Wesley is a Stellar rep, I’m not surprised that they knew each other) and I let them paddle side by side while I took Stellar guy’s stern wake, although eventually, I ended up on Wesley’s because it looked like he was going to make a move go get back to that big pack. We’d put in a small gap on V10L guy, although a couple of times he fought his way back up to my stern wake. I still couldn’t recover, it was just too hot and humid. I wanted to get my heart rate into the 150s, which I know is where I need to be if I don’t want to blow up, but the only way I could do that would be to lose Wesley and the other guy’s wakes.

The upstream turn was on a bridge abutment. I think we had a solid gap on V10L guy by then, but Wesley, Stellar guy and I were neck and neck. Turning into the breeze felt really good, although it was slowing us down something fierce. I was now on Wesley’s side wake and even tried to take a few short turns leading him. I didn’t even notice when we lost Stellar guy, but Wesley and I both seemed to notice it at the same time, and he suddenly put the hammer down (or I died a little, not sure which) and he was off. He got a good gap on me and I figured he was gone for good. But at least now I could get my heart rate down out of the 160s.

On the way down, we had to do a loop of the island, repeating our trip up the narrow channel. In a way, this was an enormous drag, but it did add some interesting features to the racing. As I was passing the outlet to the channel on my way down, a group of faster paddlers came out of the channel heading downstream and I managed to jump on the wake of the last of them and ride them for a few minutes. Then it was “drag my way up the channel and emerge back into the downstream for the final section”, but as I was nearing the channel entrance a group of three C1s, the first of the open men C1s, came roaring by. The first guy tried to scrape the other two off on me, and the third one banged his paddle into my boat repeatedly before he dropped off. But in the process, they basically cut me off directing me to the entrance to the channel again, which I did not want to do. I had to stop paddling and let them go by so I could continue downstream. I was annoyed at the time, but hey, it’s all racing, right? That first guy was using good tactics against his two rivals even if it wasn’t good for me.

By the time we were in the last part heading downriver, it was shockingly sow – I was working as hard as I ever do and only managing speeds in the high 9s, low 10s. In still water and still air, even as fatigued as I was, I should have been doing mid to high 10s. One time I looked at my heart rate and it was down in the 140s, which seemed crazy low. Wesley was having real problems. I don’t know if he was cramping up or having balance issues, but every time I looked in his direction he seemed to be bracing. I was slowly catching him back up, and as I put in more effort my heart rate was back in the high 150s where I expected it to be. I hit the first of the yellow buoys, which I’d measured before the race as being 750 meters from the finish and I was about 2 boat lengths behind Wesley and closing fast when he suddenly turned his boat slightly and looked back and saw me, and he put in a big burst of speed. I had no finish sprint in me and I finished a few lengths behind him.

After clearing the finish line, I joined a bunch of other surf ski paddlers who were jumping out of their boats and swimming to cool off. What a great relief that was!

After the race, I was standing near my boat when one of the safety officials came over and yelled at me for having a Mocke PFD. According to him, USCA rules require US Coast Guard Approved PFDs only. Never mind that Mocke vests are ISO standard approved, and accepted by every canoe and kayak and surf ski organization in the world, and never mind that this river was so shallow and still that in the unlikely event that I somehow got separated from my boat I could have walked to shore, he said “I don’t know anything about what ISO means, just that it’s not American” or something like that, and he also said “Don’t you dare come back here without a Coast Guard approved vest”. It annoys the piss out of me that I can wear a Mocke PFD in the hairiest ocean races and through Swell City on the Gorge – places where I might legitimately have to make a remount or two, but here in flatsville I have to carry any old piece of shit that has a USCG approval sticker on it.

Now I found a web page that says that the USCA does allow the Mocke, Vaikobi, and other ISO approved PFDs, but only if they’re worn, not if they’re on the boat. (And this isn’t on the USCA page, so it’s possible this is just a proposed change that never got applied.) But it was too damn hot to wear it. One guy I talked to afterward said he’s going to take an old USCG approved PFD, unstitch it, take out half the floatation, stitch it back up, and use that as his (in the boat) PFD. I don’t recommend that. At some races in Australia, I’ve heard they have a very simple test – they attach a 5kg weight to your PFD and throw it in the water. If it floats, it’s a 50 Newton PFD and so, therefore, legal. (5kg of mass exerts approximately 50 Newtons of downward force in standard earth gravity.)

So after that bit of annoyance, the next part was even more annoying. When I picked up my race number this morning, they were out of goodie bags and shirts. So I had to wait for registration to re-open. And that wasn’t supposed to happen until after results were up. So I waited for the results to come up. And waited, and waited, and waited. Finally, at 4pm, 5 hours after I finished, they said “we still don’t have results, but we’re going to give the first, second and third place prizes now”. I knew I wasn’t getting any of them, so I took a chance and wandered over to registration and sure enough they were open and giving out goodie bags. If I’d known, I could have gone back to my hotel, had a shower, had a nap, and still returned in time for them to not have results up.

So anyway, this was a pretty good event, right up until the finish. The venue wasn’t perfect, I would have preferred deeper water and fewer weeds. But the start was well organized, the course was interesting, the loop around the island was an interesting wrinkle, and everything was well marked and clear. The onshore area was shaded and very pleasant, and they had good PA and there were some good food trucks. They even had adequate parking, although some people had to park a ways away. It was just too bad that they screwed up so badly on the results, and that their safety guy was such a jerkwad about the PFD issue.

Update: The USCA magazine has a write-up of the race from a racer’s point of view. Reading it, it’s obvious it was the guy I referred to above as “Stellar Guy”, but a photo credit in the article identifies him as Steve Horney. Here’s what he wrote:

I latched on to one racer who was making good time, then about halfway up the river we switched places and he drafted me until we caught up with Wesley Echols (who appeared to be having a tough time of it in the heat). We all ran together to the bridge where after making the turn and beginning the trip back I opted to suck down an energy gel pack. Somehow the energy transferred to Wesley and the other guy; they took off like a shot, and I was no more energized than I was before.

I guess that explains where he vanished to after the turn, but it’s interesting how he thought we were only traded leads once and I thought we were trading more often than that.

New camera: Contour Roam3

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?

First paddle with the Motionize Edge

I bought a Motionize Paddle Edge, a combination of hardware and software (iPhone app) that is supposed to analyze your paddling stroke and give you real time feedback. Unfortunately it came the day before I left for my western vacation, so I didn’t get a chance to try it out. But I’m back now, and so today was the first chance to try it out. We were heading out to the bay for an interval session, which is probably not the best place to try this out, because the boat wakes make it hard to maintain any sort of consistency in your paddling.

Setting it up was very easy, except for one thing: I couldn’t get it to see my Wahoo TIKR heart rate strap. Wahoo Fitness sees it, and so does Apple Health, but the Motionize App couldn’t. I tried a few things they suggested to no avail. Spoiler alert: at the end of the session, I tried again and it seemed to pair. I’ll let you know if I get heart rate info next time. In the app, I had to tell it information about me, about my boat, and about my paddle (including length and offset). I also went in and configured it so that two of the fields are showing different information than the default – I wanted my heart rate and stroke rate to be on there, although, like I said, I didn’t get heart rate actually working this time. Hopefully next time. I wish there was an option to have a second screen of data, because I would have liked additional data.

The hardware consists of a sensor that goes on your paddle (that putty colored box just to the right of the center) and a sensor that goes on your boat (a similar putty colored box that goes close to the centerline in front of the cockpit). Both of those attach to mounts that stick on with double sided tape. There is also a RAM universal mount, which I’ve attached just below the bungees. The Motionize comes with two leashes with small carabiners, one a extra security for the boat sensor, and one for your phone case. You can see my Epic Gooper case is tied in but not in the RAM mount because I was using my phone to take the picture. The paddle sensor doesn’t have a leash, it has a built-in rubber band that acts as the secondary security for that.

So once you’re ready to paddle, you go into the app and select which boat and paddle profile you want (you can store multiple – you can probably buy extra mounts for your other boats and paddles) and start the workout. The orange buttons on the paddle sensor can be used to switch between screens in the app and pause and end the session. I didn’t try using it to start the session, but it would a really good thing if it did have that ability.

Ok, first thing that happens is I get this graph that is a little hard to understand, but it’s telling me that my paddle strokes are around 1.3-1.5 meters long (don’t worry, Americans, it starts off in non-metric units, I switched it) and that I’m getting around 2.1 meters of boat travel per stroke. Also, when I’m not working too hard, my stroke rate is around 60 strokes per minute. Also, if I hit the button on the paddle, I can get a live top view of where my paddle is entering and exiting the water. It’s displaying the actual optimal zones for where you want that to occur, and mostly my entries are in the good zone but my exits are a bit too far back. That’s something obvious to work on. One thing I noticed is that if you’re on a big side wave and your paddle enters the water up above the nominal water line of the boat, it doesn’t seem to record that as an entry until the wave passes far enough that your blade is now below the nominal waterline of the boat. Not sure if that’s an error or not.

The second thing that I notice is that in bright sunlight it’s often really hard to see my screen, especially when we were heading north up the Bay. Mike suggested I rig up some sort of shade over the phone – or maybe there’s some anti-glare screen cover? I don’t know, I’ll need to experiment. Later on when we turned in a different direction I had no problems reading it.

10 minutes or so into the warm up, the app completely froze up. I had to go back to the dock and kill the app and restart it, and it lost all the workout. But I’m keeping in mind that this is early days with the app, and hopefully they’ll fix whatever caused that soon.

But it recorded the rest of the workout just fine. During intervals, I discovered that my stroke isn’t changing much, which is good, although my stroke rate is going up to nearly 80. Still getting 2.1 meters of boat travel per stroke, which seems like good news to me.

At one point during the workout, the app flashed up a coaching screen that said to keep my eyes forward instead of down. Ok, first, how did they know? And second, of course my eyes were down, I was trying to see what this app was telling me! Also at the very end, on the workout summary, it said “Catch water with a full blade”, along with a little diagram that appears to diagramming pushing the blade down into the water on the catch.

One slightly concerning thing is that I started the workout with a fully charged phone, and a few minutes before the end my phone popped up the “20% battery, should I go into low power mode” dialog. Hopefully whatever is causing the app to suck down battery life like that will be fixed soon, or it was just an anomaly caused by the freeze-up. We’ll see.

After the workout, you can see the aforementioned “Catch water with a full blade” coaching tip. I think they mean to make sure I’m really burying the blade before I start to pull, which is something I’ve worked on for years. The other thing it is telling me is that I need to get the blade out of the water quicker. Again, that’s not news. What is news is that I seem to be planting the left catch a tiny bit further forward than the right catch. I can see this sort of thing being really useful doing drills on flat water. Further down, the map has some colour coding on my route that I’m not sure about. On the app, as opposed to on this screenshot which is sends when you tell it to share your workout, the map has a bar at the bottom showing a color bar that goes from green to red, but it says “Fastest: 36.00 mph” on the green side and “Slowest: 0.21 mph” on the red side. I guarantee you that I never went 36.00 mph – Garmin Connect says my top speed was 12.0 km/hr. Also I can’t really match up the green or the red parts of the line with the fast parts of my graph from my Garmin. But I do want to highlight that one place where they are displaying things in miles per hour as a bug to be fixed.

Not related to Motionize, but I’m really sore from my trip. I don’t know if I’ll go do a technique session tomorrow or just rest, but I’m definitely not going to do the Wednesday Night time trials.

Gorge Downwind Championships, Race Day

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?

Gorge Downwind Championships, Day 4

Today was supposed to be the biggest day we’ve seen so far this week, although tomorrow is supposed to be even better. Today I was scheduled to do another run in a double ski, this time with American legendary paddler Carter Johnson. If you don’t recognize the name, check out Joe Glickman’s movie about the US Surfski Championships a few years ago where he points out Carter as being top American. It was Carter’s videos in the Gorge that convinced me to come here. I’m not sure what insane level of organizational skill you need to have to organize a week long event for 300 paddlers and still have time to go out for paddles with people like me, but Carter has it.

The forecast was for it to really start ripping by 3pm. We were scheduled to paddle at 12:30, but the wind actually picked up pretty strongly by the time we got on the water. Carter was understandably in a hurry, so we rushed a bit at the put-in and I forgot to hit start on my GPS, so I don’t know exactly when we got going, but I think it was around 1:15 or so. Also unfortunately, my problems with my GoPro continued so while I thought I’d gotten it started, it actually didn’t record anything. Which is really too bad, because Carter gave a ton of good advice and instruction that I wish I had a record of.

As we were walking down to the beach, he emphasized that we were going to let a lot of waves go – unlike the guys like Dawid and Jasper Mocke or Sean Rice who train 25+ hours a week, we have other jobs and so we have to economize on our paddling and only go for the waves that we can get on easily, not the ones that you have to really dig for. But by picking the right waves, we’d keep our boat speed up and get good rides. And he wasn’t lying – we ended up on huge waves, with Carter holding his paddle and arms up triumphantly over his head while I tried to catch my breath and get a look around.

As we started out, once again I noticed that twitchiness I mentioned yesterday, even before he got in. He tried to calm me down and relax me, and we paddled out at a warm up pace. But then suddenly he would give a signal and we’d sprint like hell, and 4 or 5 strokes later we’d be up on a wave and recovering. His sprints are amazingly fast, and it often took me a couple of strokes to get synced up with him and sometimes I’d barely get one or two strokes in before it was time to stop paddling. He’d point out a wave on our left or right that we were heading to next – unfortunately I relied on my GoPro catching all this stuff, so I’d just make sure my head turned that way with an eye to review it later, and not always taking it all into my consciousness. Carter keep up a complete monologue of what he was looking at and what he was doing. I just wish more of it had sunk in.

We went into Swell City, and it was even more amazing than yesterday. He warned me ahead of time that things looked a little hairy and he might not be able to talk all the time, but for me to watch his body language and try to match him when he needed power or when he needed me to stop paddling. He also reassured me that even if I blew my balance or leaned the wrong way, that I wouldn’t put him off because he could easily overpower me. Well, it turned out that I don’t think anything stopped his monologue. I blew my contribution a number of times when he was putting in huge amounts of power very quickly – sometimes all I could do was try to keep my paddle from dragging and just watch what he was doing. At least this time I didn’t clonk him on the back of the head like I’d done with Ryan yesterday – today I was a lot more cognisant that when you’re bracing down a wave front, your up hand needs to be forward rather than equal with the down hand. That’s a lesson I vaguely remember from Tarifa but it had never really been a problem until yesterday (and now today). I’m not even sure how that prevents you from catching a blade so well, but it does.

I spent a lot of time with a bucket full of water. This is especially true when trying going across the waves. Towards the bottom of Swell City, Carter said that the waves were driving us towards the left shore, but we needed to move right. I assumed that was so we could exit the big stuff near the end of the sand spit. But after crossing a few wave fronts and moving right, we seemed to be moving left again. I wanted to ask why we were doing that, but never got a chance. We were so close to the left shore I felt I could have thrown something onto shore. But then we got even further down – almost level with the sand spit. And now we in smaller choppier waves, and we were moving right almost perpendicular to them. We crossed behind the spit and were now in flat water and perpendicular to the wind, and it was suddenly obvious just how strong the wind is – it felt like it would have taken my hat if not for the (unfortunately useless) GoPro head strap. We paddled at what Carter considers a warm-down and what I would call a moderate cruise, and finished in the shallow water of the channel.

Tomorrow is the race day, and the winds are supposed to be strong again. I’m thoroughly intimidated by what Swell City looks like in big wind conditions. They say that there are less intimidating conditions to the right side of the river. The other factor is that after a 7 mile downwind run, I’ve ended up sore and tired and was actually wishing for the end before it came. The long race is 13 miles, but only the last 8 miles is through or beside Swell City. There is also an 8 mile race, but the start line is almost exactly in the entrance to Swell City, on the left side of the river. I could switch to the short race, but it seems like I’d have to go right through at least the early part of Swell City to get to the more benign part of the river. But on the other hand, I’d at least not be tired for that part of the river. I guess I’ll have to make that decision tomorrow morning.