Another update

Finally found another image of me on the liffey! This is post boat breaking so I am very full of water and extremely tired. Finished repairing the boat yesterday so while ugly it is stiffer than it was when i got it!
There has not been much paddling done since the Liffey. I competed in the Cork rodeo a few weeks ago, managing to win the C1 heat, I also competed in K1 for the 1st time in well over 2 years and managed to win my heat!
Apart from that the only paddling I have managed is a couple of indifferent squirt sessions. Oh well, surf competition, sluice rodeo and the crana boatercross to look forward to before i go to australia! Cant wait.

Liffey Descent 2010

Last weekend was the 51st Liffey Descent. This is the first year I have ever been in the country for it so decided to head down for the laugh. I managed to get my hands on a C1 WWR, which I decided to take down. I love paddling this boat and it's great fun but I regretted it a little on some of the flatwater sections. While it is really fast on moving water I struggle to make it go on the flat.

The liffey race itself proved pretty eventful, I started well back from the pack as I am still not entirely happy in the boat and had no intention of going in on the start line. I then had a decent enough race making reasonable time ( I could see the proper C1 paddlers still), until someone capsized me in the jungle trying to overtake me. This was an absolute disaster! The jungle has no way to get back into the boat and I had also managed to get wrapped around a tree stopping me rolling. It took me around 15 minutes to get back into the boat and racing again. The race again proved uneventful up until lucan wier where I managed to break the boat very badly. I was unable even with an entire roll of duck tape to stop the leak and ended up paddling with a half full boat of water for the rest of the race which was an interesting experience. This slowed my time down even more. Very annoying as I hit every other weir on the race apart from wrens really well and to then break the boat on one of only 2 I screwed up wasn't particularly nice. I also managed to swim on Wrens nest after taking a real silly line.

This left me finishing the race in a very slow 3:19 however can't wait to patch the boat up and get back on the water! I love paddling it and at least now know what to expect.

Toome session

With a complete lack of water everywhere I decided to make the trek to toome. This is a low water feature that works when nothing else does, in other words it's perfect. The feature itself is shallow, resulting in more than the odd scratched boat and broken paddle!

On Wednesday I headed up on the bus, I've never seen the feature so busy with 11 other people in the eddy. It had been months since I had been there but was still throwing roundhouses, very occasional blunts and cartwheels. The feature is very hard to intiate and stick in a C1 as it is so fast and it is very hard to get enough speed to stay surfing.

On Thursday I headed up again with Vix from LCP. This was a real fun and productive session for me, still no real spectacular moves but I am starting to get the hand of initating moves here, just not landing them yet!