Worlds update

After a week at the worlds I finally have the time for a wee update.

The entire team is staying in steiffisburg just outside Thun. We got a pair of houses which are really nice and there is decent public transport into the City centre, it takes about 10 minutes on the bus. Our house even has a nuclear bunker for some reason! Apparently this used to be required by law but it was pretty funny to find. Apparently the swiss team is staying in one.
The weather is pretty hot, it was 34 degrees when I arrived in Switzerland and has gone up as high as 37, even at night it is very hot but seems to be cooling down in the last few days. Hopefully it will stay that way as paddling and sleeping in those kinds of temperatures is pretty difficult.

Thun itself is a lovely city, it is pretty small and does not seem to have changed much in hundreds of years. There is still ancient castles and churches everywhere and it is very close to the alps. The water is not that cold at all, I was expecting cold glacial melt but as it flows out of a lake it is warm enough. The water is crystal clear and the bottom and fish are easily visible! It is nice after years of paddling in brown peaty water in Ireland. There has been a lot of complaining about the wave. It seems to go completely green at times and is not particularly big or retentive which is a pity as the location is pretty much perfect with viewing stands and convenient boat storage. The big names are still throwing huge moves though.
It can be very difficult to get time on the wave, each team is allocated about 30-40 minutes on the wave to practice and outside of that it is very difficult to get any time as everyone wants to get used to such a difficult and changeable feature. Even at stupid times like 0400 there is still a queue of about 20-30 people waiting for a go meaning 20 minute gaps between rides. However some of the team have been lucky and gotten times when there is significantly less people on the water. I have yet to be so lucky!

I am personally really struggling with the wave and it is only in the last 2 days or so I have been able to consistently catch it. It is an offside ferry on which I found difficult to begin with as I have always been very weak at offside ferrygliding and combined with the speed of the water I was thrown completely. However now I have hopefully cracked it. I am also really struggling to stay on the wave after doing any moves. It seems for this wave anyway one of the new Jackson boats or a composite boat is the way to go. Anything else seems to be too slow to be practical. Anyone in slower designs is pretty much out of the game on this feature.

Thankfully I am having a bit more luck with the squirt event. The squirt feature is also pretty poor with no real downtime being offered up yet. Most of us are getting chest deep mysteries of only about 4-5 seconds. Some guys are going for longer but not very many. My new boat came over with the GB squirt boaters which is great. I was worried the boat might be a bit big but it seems to be a pretty good cut so no problems there! Its definitely a better boat than my old one for competition as the old one was difficult to throw around on flatwater. The new boat seems slightly harder to sink but is a much better allrounder. It is great seeing other squirt boaters on the water. In Ireland there is only maybe 4 or 5 regular squirt boaters and we are spread right across the country. Having 4 times that many in the one place is great! I am certainly learning lots off some of the other boaters.
Its a much nicer place to be than the main wave I think. Over at the squirt boating spot everyone is much friendlier and more helpful. At the main wave everything is governed by specific times and peoples training sessions whereas the squirt spot is open and people just come and go as they please.

Unfortunately I broke my helmet strap yesterday too. I now have it fixed but spent the day wearing a purple flowery sweet strutter borrowed from one of the GB girls. It looked and felt pretty silly and it feels good to have my own helmet back. I was glad of the lend though as It only broke literally 5 minutes before my scheduled training session.

Anyway I have to rush off to the squirt boating meeting as they are changing the rules slightly and want to meet the paddlers to get a consensus on it. I have some photos and will try to post them up once I get some more spare time.

Freestyle world championships

Tomorrow I head to Switzerland for the freestyle world championships. I am competing in the Squirt and C1 categories!
This will be my first time competing on an International level, I am very excited at the prospect of getting to compete at the worlds and can't wait to get over and start competing.

Unfortunately along the way I picked up tendonitis and combined with the lack of rain I have not been able to train for a few days so I am not quite as well prepared as I hoped to be by this stage. However I think it should be fine given plenty of Ice and painkillers.

Assuming I can find a decent computer/internet over there I will try to make a few updates over the next couple of weeks, hopefully with photos also.

Cork Rodeo

On Saturday Kevin and Myself travelled down to compete in the Cork rodeo. It was my first time paddling in Cork so playing in the hole for the first time was a bit of an experience! The hole itself is a steep, retentive feature so cartwheels were very easy, but I found it difficult to do much else. I managed a loop or two (none in competition unfortunately) but apart from that I was not able to do much at all. The hole was not very C1 friendly and served beatings out to several paddlers. I got a couple of nasty ones too with a couple of intimate moments with the left hand wall.
The event was great craic, I can't wait till the next one!

Photos thanks to Dave Patterson

http://picasaweb.google.com/Daves.Pics2001/CorkRodeo09

Benburb

I ended up in the North for a few days so I decided to go for a paddle while I was there. Unfortunately due to the series of buses I had to take I wasn't able to bring a boat with me. That left paddling Kevin's Crazy-88. It had been quite a while since I paddled a K1 playboat so I had a little trouble at the start with the 2nd blade getting in my way when I tried to do anything. This was especially true when I was surfing the wave below the bridge. The first couple of times i was surfing on my left side I kept tripping over my left blade because I was so used to just sticking my hand in the water like I do in C1.

The river was at a low enough level but there was a couple of decent waves running further downstream. One of the nice things about the benburb is it can usually be run in either high or low water.

There was a huge amount of fishermen out on the river. Coming down through the triple steps one of them was giving me a real hard time about how we were disturbing the fish and scaring them off the bottom, despite being water that is 8ft deep and full of silt! I didn't even bother arguing back.

It amazes me how narrow minded fishermen can be sometimes. Having fished myself for years it is clear that kayaks do not scare fish in the slightest, certainly far less than some guy running around in the water wearing waders!

Myself and Kevin played on the water for about 3 hours before getting off, we then got a text from some of the Jordanstown lads saying they were heading to the same river after work so we got on for another 2-3 hour session. When we finally made it off the water it was almost completely dark having spent most of the day on the water.

Team Training

On Saturday I headed down to Curragower for the team training session. However as it turned out only six people turned up to paddle including three of us from the team. Because of this we all got plenty of time on the wave!
The wave itself was great for most of the session, with the wave only dying off after 5 hours of decent running. The weather was also quite nice. I spent the whole day in a shorty cag for a change.

For the first hour or so of the session I was having no luck at all. I am still coming to terms with the agent, it is far more responsive than my old boat and I think it will be another session or two before I am fully comfortable with it.

However for the last 3 or 4 hours of the session I got some pretty decent runs and threw some decent modes, but also had some absolutely horrible wipeouts. I think the problem is the rails are far sharper (The wheelboy has round rails!) so i am tripping over myself, particularly on the offside.

Unfortunately I had to head home early and missed today's session. Hopefully gower will work in the next while as I could really do with the wave time.

Squirt boating

After It finally rained enough to bother, I headed to the meetings
of the waters in wicklow. The river was running at a medium-low
level so I decided to try checking the meetings out
to see if it offered up any kind of decent downtime.

I got consistent shoulder deep mystery moves of about 5 seconds.
Unfortunately i got nothing deeper at all but then again I only
spent around an hour there so I hope that ill get deeper on future
visits.

The margin for getting a mystery seemed very
tight but with further exploring hopefully I will get a better
understanding of the spot.

At least the spot seems relatively deep, I didn't strike the
bottom at all during the mystery moves though eddying out
is difficult due to the fast flow downstream and much shallower
water.

Boat testing

Having finally completed my new C1 (Dagger agent) I brought it out on flatwater to check the trim etc before I try running anything in it.
I was actually pleasantly surprised! Its very stable which surprised me considering it is such a narrow boat in comparison to anything ive paddled as C1 before. It is also very easy to roll.
Thankfully I got the outfitting right pretty much first time. The trim is all correct all I need to do is adjust the knee padding slightly as my knees are able to lift slightly when I cartwheel.
My only complaint with the boat itself is there is a lot of volume in the back so it is difficult to flatwater cartwheel, which is a non issue anyway as It will be pretty much only used as a wave boat.
I can't wait to get it out on a proper feature and test it out for real.

I also got to test out the new spraydeck. Snapdragon made up a spraydeck for this boat for me. Because the seating position in C1 is so far forward in comparison to how the boat is normally paddled the deck had to be custom made. I am very impressed with the deck too. It proved very dry and comfortable and fits perfectly.