New Year, New Water

It has been about a month since my last paddle (and subsequent blog) I think I will blame Christmas for that a little bit. I went home to Shropshire for a few weeks and although I planned to take my boat to put some miles on my old river, I’m glad that I didn’t. The Severn was huge. I don’t know why I was surprised as it is almost always in flood during the winter but it was quite intimidating all the same.

Anyway. This weekend we headed back to the water. It was a change of scene and change of boat for me this week. I borrowed my paddle partners Hobby2, while she piloted her older (but lighter) Talisman, and we put in on the Wey and Arun canal. The reason for the change of boat is that I am getting concerned that the DW is only a couple of months away and I am still capable of falling out of my Lancer so I wanted to try something much more stable, and the change of location was so we can do some portaging for once.

The Wey and Arun is a nice enough canal, if a little short. About seven kilometres there and back but there are two (very muddy) portages which is something we have yet to really practice and I am currently not very excellent at.

I actually really enjoyed the paddle this weekend. While (surprisingly) heavy, the Hobby is such a solid boat I didn’t have to dedicated a portion of my effort on simply balancing and instead I could enjoy the feeling of zipping through the water in a K1.

I do think I need to spend a bit of time just getting in and out of the boat though as my portage technique is not very polished to say the least. I grab the front of the boat, pull my feet close to the seat sort of crouch/stand and then flop my belly on the bank, in what I suspect looks akin to a seal flopping out of the water. It sort of works most of the time, but this week one of the get outs had some kind of barbed chicken wire mesh on (I assume to give grip to someone standing on it) which I really didn’t want to flop onto so I dithered and flailed for ages. Clearly not good enough.

Christmas Barge

I am feeling really positive about my kayaking at the moment. I think I banished a few demons by going out midweek, another session on Sunday cemented my feeling that I could be able to do the DW in my new boat. There are still some concerns, but not as many.

Heading to Chichester canal with my DW partner who took out an old Talisman that she bought a few weeks ago because she is worried that her Hobby2 is too heavy. Considering it is December, the weather was really mild and unlike my session on Thursday there was pleasantly no wind.

We set off at a fair pace and stayed mostly together, though early on I was struggling with stability when I got into the churned water of her wash. There were also few narrow boats out doing a Father Christmas run http://chichestercanal.org.uk/boat-trips/father-christmas/, which gave me more churned water to deal with. I wimped out when they went past deciding to hug the bank and wait for the wash to pass rather than paddle through and risk a capsize.

After we turned in the basin I waited for a stunted little barge to leave ahead of me not realising that I would have been considerably faster than it had I committed to go, I then found myself stuck behind it unable to get too close because if I found the wake from a slender Talisman a bit of a problem, the backwash from this inelegant tub was causing me havoc. Eventually they slowed to observe a belligerent heron and I gritted my teeth and ploughed through the bow wave.

I had fallen some distance behind my friend and really had to put the power down to catch up. I found my focus and worked really hard trying to keep the paddle cadence up. Usually when I try to speed up I eventually catch the paddle awkwardly and end up setting myself up for a tank slapper but for about two kilometres I was in the zone. I don’t think I have worked that hard in a kayak for a long time but was a really nice feeling to be flying along only focusing on catch, rotate, power, catch, rotate, power.

We started a second lap and I was much happier dealing with the disturbed water from another kayak, probably because I had to deal with that barge earlier in the morning. We had some impromptu “efforts” whenever we drew alongside (you remember efforts from when I had that taster session at the Wey kayak club?) at full power I was generally the faster, be it I have a quicker boat, more strength, or both.

We had completed 10k in a little under an hour and twenty minutes and I finally had to deal with my current nemesis, namely getting out. I decided to try this week from a fishing pontoon rather than at the quayside where we put in, because it was a little bit lower (and wasn’t made of concrete which has been scratching my boat). I did achieve what I think is my first dry exit from a K1 but it wasn’t pretty and for anyone watching I'm certain it resembled a seal hauling itself onto a beach.

I think I have two main challenges at the moment, dealing with turbulent water and getting out of my boat for portages. Both essential for the DW but they are bite sized things to work on.

Last Annual Leave before Christmas

In my last post I vocalised that fact that I was starting to get a bit concerned by how little time I have spent in my boat, especially considering it still gives me a little fright every time I think I have tamed the wobble. Well I decided to do something about it and took my last remaining holiday off specifically to go for a paddle.

I headed for my favourite section of canal in Chichester (it’s not my favourite section of canal, that honour goes to the first few miles of the Llangollen canal from Hurleston, but Chichester seems to be the only place I am comfortable to paddle my K1 at the moment) and put on for a solo paddle.

I had a tail wind for the first 2kms as I headed toward the basin which helped with my speed and not long after I had started I achieved my max speed of the day. Turning around was a bit sketchy as the wind caught me and my boat at an angle which nearly saw me swimming, and it wasn’t until it was against me did I realise what a boon it had been for the first two kilometres.

After about 40 minutes or so I had completed a lap of the canal and usually I would stop there, but I had taken a day’s holiday for this and I was going to make the most of it. I headed off again for another trip to the basin and back which rounded the total distance up to 10kms.

I didn’t fall in… Well. I didn’t fall in while paddling which was a pleasant change. I did still have to throw in a few support strokes every now and then but in general I felt very confident in the boat. I do seem to have a problem getting out of it though, in fact, I don’t think I have managed a dry exit yet. I pulled up to the bank tried a couple of times to get out before finally losing the battle and plopped in, which was a shame as it had been a very successful paddle up to that point. My concern is the 77 portages on the DW, which currently means 77 dunkings.

Word of the Week

It has now been three weeks since I have sat in my kayak (in fact any kayak, mine or otherwise) and I can’t believe how quickly this month is flying by. Ongoing manflu, injuries, the grim weather, and other prior commitments, have kept me in rude supply of believable excuses for staying away from the water. I am however painfully aware that I have a boat that is more unstable than I am used to sitting in my back garden and not being practiced in, while the Devises to Westminster race creeps ever closer. I’m actually not too worried about the race per se, I have battered myself on multi day events a few times and know that I have the minerals to get to the end. But if keep putting off this training malarkey I might not be quick enough to make it to the end. This post is essentially me voicing my own kick up the bum to go and train in my boat.

I do want to talk about other sports today though. Predominantly this blog is about my journey to get to the DW and I don’t want to venture too far from topic but I am, to a degree, using other sports to improve my fitness for the race so it is sort of about the DW… Isn’t it?

Anyway Quadrathlon is the word of the week. It’s like a triathlon but with a kayak interval throw in to join the run, ride, and swim. Up until yesterday I hadn’t really given this sport a thought, I think I was aware that a multi-discipline event with a kayak section might exist but I hadn’t looked into it at all… I take part in the other sports individually already and when my DW partner mentioned the quad to me, a little seed was sewn.

There is a long way to go with this, a tri specific wetsuit, and a tri-suit will need to be found, and I will need to work on my running, riding, and swimming in addition to kayaking if I am to finish anywhere but last (and as it seems that there are usually quite small fields of entrants the chances of being at the back are high). There is however a quadrathlon next September held in my old hometown and I am very seriously considering entering. The idea of this event has really got me excited, probably because I haven’t done it before, and at the moment I am mentally working up a training plan. I guess only time will tell if this really is my new passion or just simply the word of the week…

I have a Cold.

I was feeling pretty rough with some kind of head cold this week, and with the weather being a bit Novemberly it combined to make for a fairly uninspiring kayaking session on Saturday.

I had intended to tighten my rudder cable before my next session in the kayak, so while my other half was out I brought the boat into the house so I could tinker in the dry (it was raining). I thought I knew how to do it having spied a couple of locking nuts attached to the cable behind the footplate I had formulated a plan which involved screwdrivers and really long arms. Quite quickly I managed to remove one of the nuts, I attempted and failed to pull the cable tight and then spent another hour trying to put the nut back to its original position. This morning I have had a look on the internet and I think I should have been looking at the rudder end of the boat to tighten the cable, I will have another go before the next trip.

My DW partner and I headed for Chichester canal again (once my boat was put back together) with a plan to do a couple of circuits to extend the distance we have so far been covering. It was cold, and drizzling and just a bit grotty and after paddling for just under 2 kilometres I fell in. I think I was avoiding a fisherman’s line but to be honest I wasn’t feeling great (with my cold) and almost certainly just lost a bit of concentration. I saddled up though and carried on down to the basin and was able to maintain a nice steady pace.

While turning in the basin, at the furthest point from the bank I thought to myself that it would be a rubbish place to capsize, as if to prove it to myself I accidently caught my paddle edge and promptly capsized. The water was deep and cold and it was very much a rubbish place to fall in. Getting the boat back to the jetty took an age, and by the time I had fished myself out I was very cold. Boat emptied we headed back the way we came, but I was feeling a bit miserable with a cold (germs) and cold (temperature) so we didn’t go for another lap, instead packed up and heading home.

I felt much quicker (when I was not swimming) this week. I had put some markers on my paddle so I was always holding the paddle correctly, and despite the fact that I fell in a couple of times I did feel more stable than ever so was able to focus more on technique. Whenever I wanted to I was able to put the power down and cruise past my friend in her more stable but slower Hobby2. Average speed this week was again 7.9km/h despite falling in twice, and I hit a slightly higher top speed of 11.2km/h. I need to sort out my rudder though as it is becoming tiresome to steer with something so vague.

Missing Wing Nuts

Finally, I get to write a positive post. After last week’s machinations I did decide to get the lime green racing machine after all. It sat there all shiny and new, every day calling me to go out to play until finally on Sunday I got to give her a real shake down. The boat wasn’t the only piece of kit that I was trying out for the first time this week. My DW partner found a set of second hand split wings somewhere or other and they arrived midweek and I also bought myself the nookie softcore I had been hankering after (and it won’t feature much more in this post but it is as warm and as lovely as I knew it would be).

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)

The Lime Green Racing Machine

This blog post is going to be a bit of a brain dump for me, I don’t even know how it’s going to end but hopefully it will be cathartic and help me come to some kind of decision on a boat.

This weekend began with the kayak gods smiling on me. After the Thruster left my all too brief care earlier in the week to go to a better home and hopefully a better paddler I was left without a K1, I had a relatively small budget to play with and the clock is very much ticking for training. Then out of the blue I received a letter from the bank saying that they had made a terrible mistake on a loan I had long forgotten about and wanted to make it up to me by sending some apology money, overnight the budget for my kayak doubled.

This meant that Sunday we had a road trip to Southampton to look at a boat I have had an eye on for a little while, a Knysna Lancer CX. Looking over the internet the manufacturer says it is a stable boat for the smaller paddler, which could mean anything but with a weight limit of 80kg, I’m going to be at the top end of that. It does look great though, the gel coat on the one I am looking at is a love/hate lime green colour which I very firmly love, and it has a tiller which I am more familiar with as opposed to the gas pedals that were on the Thruster. This boat ticked most of the boxes for me, the only thing left was to try her out for stability.

We met the seller next to a river for a test drive, and lowering myself into the kayak I was greeted with the all too familiar wobble of these unruly boats. Once I got the boat underway I did feel more stable than I ever did in the Thruster, and although it was quite sketchy turning the boat around I didn’t swim and consoled myself that you don’t often do 180 degree turns in K1s. According to my wife, I looked a lot more comfortable in it, and I didn’t have to throw in many low braces to remain dry for once. I think that some of the stability comes from the fact that I am near the design weight and the boat felt like it was more in the water, with the Thruster I was nearly fifty kilograms lighter than the stated weight so often it felt as though the boat was balancing on the surface.

I decided to sleep on the decision and ended up spending most of the rest of the day, and a fitful night of sleep replaying in my mind every wobble and incident that occurred during my first DW race, this time in a lime green boat wondering how I would cope. Most of my thoughts were of the last day on the Thames because the river is huge, the waves are many and I really don’t want to fall in.

So is this the racing kayak for me? It’s a lovely boat and is practically brand new with not a scratch on her, it looks great, is light, comfortable, and fast, and is possibly a good wobble factor for me… The “but” is that it is a lot of money to spend on a kayak that I may chicken out on paddling and decide is too wobbly to take on the DW. I’ve already done that once and I don’t want to do it again... The wobbles that I had when testing though were the familiar ones and maybe they are in the nature of K1 racing and I just need to man up and accept the perpetual threat of falling in if I let my guard down. Argh. I just don’t know!

I told the seller that I would let him know if I wanted it or not today so I really should make my mind up on this boat soon.