We headed off to the Chichester canal again. The section we have been paddling is a 3 kilometre long L shape with a turning basin at one end and is pretty much sealed at the other end by the B2201 going through it (which makes going any further a bit tricky). It does offer a 6k round trip though and is relatively shallow so perfectly fine for shorter practice runs (especially in a new boat).
There were a few teething problems before we were able to get onto the water. The first being my new split paddles. The locking mechanism is a bit fiddly with a sleeve and screw collar so once I had set the feather angle and began tightening it the blade twisted around a little bit. That would be okay if I was able to set the feather angle correctly in the first place but for some reason my brain wanted me to set it up as a left handed paddle. I needed to compare it with my friends paddle to work out how what it should look like. The other problem was the foot rest fell out of the boat. There were a couple of loose wing nuts in the cockpit when I got the boat home after buying it and unfortunately this didn’t set any alarm bells off at the time. On Sunday when I lifted the boat up the footrest fell free and was a real pain in the cockpit to get back into place. Five minutes of fiddling later it clicked home though and I was pretty confident it wouldn’t come out again for this short trip despite not having any nuts to lock it back in... I was correct.
If you’ve read any of this blog it won’t come as a surprise that I have been getting increasingly sick of falling in. My poor choice in the previous boat didn’t help but even the borrowed boat from Wey kayak club knocked my confidence as it was more tippy than I was happy with. I was understandably nervous about this new K1 but for a couple of reasons I seem to have found the one. The seat is more moulded (and comfortable) than most K1 seats I have come across, I think it is called a descent seat, and the contact points with my bum and hips seemed more akin to a white water boat. The boat is also designed for my weight so the boat sits in rather than on the water. I felt stable, it is light and really fast and I confidently declared (with a grin on my face) that this is the boat I will complete the 2016 DW race in.
There are a few things which I noticed from this week that I
need to remedy. As I’ve mentioned lots of times on this blog, I have been in or
about kayaking for the best part of thirty years and I like to think that I
know how a paddle works, unfortunately it seems I don’t. I was a little bit
annoyed with the fact that I couldn’t get the feather right but this is my
first pair of split paddles so I can forgive myself of that crime I suppose, a little
indicator line painted on the shaft to show where I want the blades to align
is all that is needed there. What I am more annoyed about is that I was holding the
paddle asymmetrically and it wasn’t until I saw the photos that I spotted the
problem. I’m going to put a couple of bits of tape to mark where I want my
hands to go but this is novice stuff. The other thing is that I also need to do is take the
slack out of the rudder cable, at the moment the steering is as vague as in a 20
year old Land Rover and a couple of times I picked up the pace to race past my
friend and each time the boat veered off toward the bank, the faster I went
the more unable to turn I became. Oh, yeah, also we need to get a kayak spares kit put together which will include amongst other things, wing nuts. This week Strava says I covered 6 kilometres, in 45:51 with a maximum speed of 10.8km/h and an average speed 7.9km/h (or 118 miles per day)
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