Warm water antics

Rolling in the pool is boring (unless you are Mackayak and can do it 20 ways).  Granted, my rolling is still pretty rubbish, but practising over and over and over again just makes me feel giddy.  I need new challenges. 

  Toys to challenge us

This year I have been working on my self rescues and my re-entry and rolls and I think they are coming on OK.  Each week, Mackayak and I think up something new to work on and try.  With talk of 4* in the air, this week we thought we’d try the infamous ‘capsize, release towline, roll up’ manoeuvre which has apparently been causing some consternation amongst 4* candidates.  We thought this must be REALLY HARD, perhaps even impossible.  We came up with a plan as towing in the swimming pool is not really possible.  I got my towline on and handed the end to Mackayak who sat on the pool side simulating a capsized boat (that tug you feel just as you think you’re about to clear the tiderace….).  I paddled off, the tow line went tight, I capsized…..dum dum dum……I pulled the toggle on my towline, released it, threw it out of the way and rolled up.  This was a bit of an issue because by this point there was still an hour and 20 minutes of the session remaining.  We needed another challenge.

As mentioned previously, the other day, my friend with gills was doing re-entry and rolls by putting on his spraydeck before coming up.  I thought this could only result in drowning for mortals without gills but was curious about the physics of the exercise.  I wanted to see whether by putting on the deck under the water, more water was kept out of the cockpit than by rolling up with it off.  I tried the standard way and made a mental note of the volume of water present once righted.  I tried again and this time put on the deck first.  I had a number of thoughts about this.  1) If you make an arse of getting your deck on, you’re liable to start running out of air.  2) If you start running out of air, you are likely to do a crap roll because you are rushing 3) To put the spraydeck on you have to let go of the paddle, this could end in tears.  Anyway, I rolled up and checked my water volume.  I think it was possibly marginally less than with deck off but not enough to make a blind bit of difference.

Doing my best to recreate outside conditions

I spent the rest of the session doing more self rescues and attempting butterfly rolls.  These were annoying me.  Last week they were clunky but worked, today they were 95% rolls.  Mackayak says this is because I have not be practising my static brace!  After a few more goes, watching the video and using the GP paddle, I still couldn’t get it so I decided to quit before I got knackered and frustrated.  Butterfly rolls will just have to be my challenge for the next session…..

I will post some video once I have edited it.