RE: [Paddlewise] Cold and skills

Mark wrote
>What was the water temperature you were working in?

G'Day Mark,

Not cold at all - 70deg F 

But in judging this, its body core temperature, the fuel that maintains it
and the clothing and layers of fat that insulate the body core, that matters
most to me. I'd had a good breakfast, was wearing five layers - rashie,
polartec vest, waterproof vest, wetsuit, cag and PFD. After about a couple
of hours activity in the water I was shivering and losing coordination.

There's a theory I've heard that body fat was a survival advantage for
Pacific islanders making long journeys between islands. High body fat so
plenty of calories stored in the body and good thermal insulation! Sadly I'm
no Pacific Islander, skinny as a rake, have to eat every hour or two and
lose heat easily!


Jim wrote
>But, so far at least, even when shivering, my roll works
>independently of my brain


G'Day Jim,

Thanks Jim you've hit the nail on the head

That's the sort of thing we were trying to learn with the sweep roll.
Currently both of us have intuitive Pawlatta's through years of practising
and they serve well in surf and when we practice in choppy seas. However,
neither of us are 'naturally' good at rolling, though we're both fit and
strong. 

We've recently had to rescue people who were unable to cope in very rough
water and its brought home to us that our margins for error are tight, so
we're moving on from just relying on one trained response and to have a
range of rolling related skills for a variety of conditions. As well as
better judgement in assessing people!

We're both at the stage where we step through the sweep roll sequence using
one or two thought reminders for stages of the roll that we're working on
and we've gone about as far as possible with that and its not intuitive. The
rolls aren't smooth and it doesn't take much distraction to wreck them. 

The next stage for us is not thinking about the sweep roll and we refuse now
to listen to comments from anyone nearby who tries to provide well meant
feedback, because we don't want to be thinking about the roll while we do
it. 

Rolling with eyes shut helps and rolling while doing something else i.e
while paddling or cracking a joke or just talking helps. If and when the
sweep roll starts to fail rather than continue rolling we go back to
relevant exercises: sweeping and high bracing and handing ourselves up off a
paddlefloat - the latter only possible if the finish position is exemplary!
The idea being that we need to reset muscle memory.

Rolling (eventually) while cold last week was a perfect example of how not
thinking about it worked under distracting conditions I want to achieve that
kind of state more often.

Hope some of that makes sense.

All the best and thanks for the comments, PeterO
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