G'Day, Today I took Lynda's technique on the water with a shaft sized as per her specification. First impressions chronologically as follows: - 1. This can't be right theres not enough effort in the stroke 2. OK but why do I keep having to stop or make an effort to slow down for my partners to catch up? 3. The cadence is maybe 50% faster than I'm used to and faster than my two partners 4. The stroke feels much less awkward now I have the shorter paddle 5. The Jet Cat passes by Middle Head with a two foot wake lets see if I can maintain the stroke - no problem! 6. Turning on top of waves without breaking stroke only worked once in every two or three attempts - need more practice. 7. Paddling with 2 or 3 foot swell - no problem 8. After several hours I don't really feel as if I've had a decent work out. So in gentle sea conditions will stick with this technique. Suspect the main thing I've been doing wrong is allowing the paddle to go past the hip where most of the effort was causing drag! Also as instructed the upper arm was relatively fixed during the stroke! The shorter paddle was helpful and on the one or two occasions when I low braced it was fine. Don't know what all this will be like in more challenging sea though. Probably none of this will suprise more experienced paddlers but as I raised the subject and will be in Atlanta without an email next week, thought I'ld voice some early feedback. Re the blade slipping through water - Lynda's method did seem to reduce/remove cavitation and I can only imagine the cavitation I've observed in the past required the wasted energy equivalent of washing a pair of socks for the whole of the the paddle! :~) Many thanks for the discussion, which was fascinating. Its taught me to take much more care with paddling technique. All the best, PeterO *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Sun May 13 2001 - 01:37:37 PDT
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0 : Thu Aug 21 2025 - 16:30:42 PDT