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.

She's gone.

This will be the shortest blog post I will ever write. (Mainly because I know full well I write too much and even now, while I ironically pad this blog post with meaningless guff, I won’t be able to match my usual ramblings for word count).

Anyway… Things move quickly in the kayaking world… approximately 48 hours quickly… On Sunday after giving her a clean and polish I took half a dozen photos of Petra, the soon to be sold K1, to be posted online for sale, and yesterday (Tuesday) evening I was helping strap her to someone else’s car. That’s it. She has gone.

So now I don’t have a boat for the DW. Hopefully something will turn up, otherwise it will be a long swim to Westminster.

I suppose I should change my profile picture now...

It’s official. I don’t like her!

It was only a matter of time before I decided enough was enough. She was just too unstable, one wrong move and I was punished, and far too harshly in my opinion. No man deserves to be dumped in the water for no reason whatsoever and as a result Petra, the Popes-Canoe Thruster is up for sale! I think I had realised that I wouldn’t be able to tame her in time for the DW a few weeks ago but I finally admitted to myself that the boat wasn’t for me this weekend. Hopefully we will find a buyer and be able to get another boat soon but until then I still need to get out there and get paddle fit… So Sunday I did.

The plan for the weekend was pretty simple; paddle for as long and as hard as possible so that I would feel the workout in the morning. Unlike the training I have been doing so far which has focused on learning to handle a K1, this time I was happy to take out pretty much anything that floated and intended to just get the muscles firing. One of my favourite boats is my Pyranha Speeder, she is a kind of hybrid between a down river racer and a white water kayak, stable and has a good turn of speed considering her weight, ideal for this weekend.

I collected my DW partner and headed to Shoreham which is about half an hour drive for me, to put on the River Adur. As it’s tidal we had to take tide times into account, so aimed to hit slack water for a paddle upstream and a falling tide for the return.

As I was hauling my Speeder along while my friend had her much lighter and more slippery K1 I was always going to struggle to keep up but I gave it my best and I don’t think I held us up too badly. I did have to use all of my river craft and wash hanging skills to maintain the pace she was setting but for about an hour we paddled quickly and non-stop.

I had made a pretty big mistake though. For some reason I decided a dry suit was a good idea (I appreciate the K1 fraternity don’t wear such cumbersome equipment but I don’t like being cold and wet). The weather was warmer than I gave it credit for considering we are at the end of October, and I also had my neoprene spraydeck and buoyancy aid on so after that hour I was practically steaming inside my waterproof, man shaped, bag. Even the (part accident/part deliberate) dip when I got out the boat when we stopped for a comfort break did little to cool me down.

The tide turned, and we followed suit enjoying the double advantage of a falling tide and river flow. I was starting to struggle to steer the Speeder toward the end, I’m not sure if it was due to the moving water, or the fact that I was getting tired and my edge turns (There’s no rudder on a Speeder) were getting sloppy, but I was glad to see the get out beach.

This week was the biggest paddle we have done together and certainly the longest I have been in a boat since early July, covering a little over 14kms, worth just under two hours, with an average of about 8kms an hour (or as we were on tidal waters… 4.3 knots). My dry suit was a bit of a misnomer though as the clothes I was wearing underneath were soaked with sweat and I probably would have finished drier without it.  

Going Clubbing

It has been a few weeks since I have been in a kayak, it is now pretty much too dark to go before or after work so I am restricted to weekend. For whatever reason(s, of which there were many) I wasn’t in the mood for going last week but this Saturday I did get back on the water courtesy of Wey Kayak Club.

My DW partner-in-crime joined the club to improve her skills in this kayaking malarkey and she convinced me to come along to the club so I could go out for a longer paddle, in a boat I am more comfortable in, with coaches around to improve my skill. I am actually surprised with how much I got from the experience of a club environment and am pleased I went… I am very much considering joining Wey myself.  

After a brief chat with one of the coaches I chose a boat that we thought would suit my abilities, I can’t remember the name of but has a wobble factor around about 6 or 7. It was a Sipre something-or-other but I can’t find it online at the moment. We joined in with a group of paddlers and set off for a 5-ish mile paddle at what initially was a more than comfortable pace for me. After a brief feeling of instability I quickly found form and quite enjoyed paddling for more than 100 metres above the surface again.

The group spread out as we were encouraged to do “Efforts”, 30 strokes at full power followed by 20 recovery strokes. While I was generally at the front of the group whenever we had an Effort, my friend was always ahead of me and I was not able to catch her, Especially on the return journey as I was starting to tire and only able to keep on my full-tilt, full-power, red-hot, maximum pace for maybe thirty seconds before I would start to fade.

Having coaches on hand was new for me, I don’t remember being taught to kayak when I was younger though I assume I must have been, and for the last few years I have been a kayak coach myself, so having someone else on hand to point out where I can improve was really helpful. I was annoyed with myself because I was being picked up on things that I pick up on with other people’s technique but I will focus more to fix myself. My white water kayaking technique was also called out as I couldn’t keep my knees together in the boat for very long, I think they thought I was trying to brace on the cockpit coaming but in reality my leg muscles (my inner thighs mainly) were tiring from holding my knees together.

At the end of the session I was able to try out a Kirton Tor. It's stability was slightly lower than the boat I had been using but was a lovely paddle and within my own instability comfort zone, I now know what boat I want for the DW... If only I can find one.

I did manage to put the session on Strava (though not all of it as I had forgotten to press start until we had turned around and were on the way back). Of the 4.4 kilometres I recorded I averaged 6.9kph and hit a top speed of 11.2kph. I don’t think that the data is meaningful at the moment but if that is my true pace I will complete the DW in about 30 hours!

On Sunday I went for a 1km swim. It didn’t involve a canal or a kayak, was intentional, and in a very nice heated swimming pool. I ached afterwards despite once being able to thrash out that sort of distance without a care, it made me realise that I am no longer as fit as I once was.

Things I am taking away from this weekend…
1. I need to get a more stable boat. I think Petra’s days are numbered.
2. I need to kayak (and generally exercise) more.
3. Despite being a kayaker for nearly 30 years, my DW partner is better than me… and she has only been doing this for eight or so weeks.

Back in the boat

I got back into the kayak. It was last weekend, Sunday I think. Details are a bit hazy as I have spent the best part of this week in Sicily on a trip with work and am still in recovery mode but I will attempt to remind myself about what happened (kayaking last weekend, not what happened Sicily).

I think it’s fair to say that the trip to the canal was more successful than the first time I was there, if nothing else I could actually count the number of times I fell in. Twice. First swim was right at the beginning after lowering myself into the boat. I think I had told myself that I was going to fall in so I then obliged. After that first dip I actually managed to stay mostly upright for the whole 4k round trip. It involved 100% concentration and many support strokes to get to the end of the canal but I managed it. Turning the boat at the end was a nervy affair and I opted to turn in the confines of the canal rather than heading out into the turning basin (which seemed to have no places to swim the boat to in the event of a capsize). Heading back up the canal I found some confidence and was able to keep the boat moving for most of the 2km stretch back to the put in. The second dunking was as a result of my bouncing the boat to try and shift the branches and leaves that were accumulating on my bow (that brought my confidence level back to a sensible level).

My wife came along to walk the dog and recorded several videos of my paddling. Watching back I don’t look confident, each stroke is hesitant and clearly not delivering much power which is disappointing as I thought I was going to look really awesome this week.

When I was in Sicily it was approximately 30 degrees, the sea was warm and one morning I even watched a pair of Nelo K1’s heading out. I came into work today in the fog, my ice warning light was on in the car and right now I am trying to decide whether I should go kayaking at the weekend again. I know the chances of a swim in the cold grim canal is quite high and as I think about dragging myself out of the muddy, nettle fringed banks, Sicily seems a very long way away.