Thursday, November 19, 2015

How Far Do You Have to Travel to Explore?

So I'm starting to run out of superlatives to describe the weekends I've been having recently! For years now I've been wanting to do some exploring and discover some of the runs that aren't paddled very often for myself. Now that I've got my own transport and no college work to do at weekends, this goal has started to come together. After two weekends of stepping things up I'm sitting here with a damaged ankle and there's a disfigured boat sitting out in the garden but oh well, I've got a week or two now to catch up on the blog, send some emails, and plan what rivers I want to paddle next! 

The most important piece of paddling kit; having the right crew around you! Around for the Cascades were Aoife Hanragan, Barry Loughnane, Cliodhna O'Donoghue, Lucien Scrieber, Mark Scanlon and Eoin Farrell. Huge thanks to Tom O'Donoghue for showing us around!

The first weekend of exploring kicked off on the Friday evening with a last-minute call by Dave Glasswell to run a race on the Owengar the next morning. For a last-minute event in a pretty remote corner of the country a great crew of paddlers showed up so fair play to everyone who made the journey down! We got there to find water levels low but runnable; just! That's the risk of running events in Ireland, you never know if the rain is going to show up or not and making the call to run an event is always a gamble. In the end we had a great day despite the water levels. We started off with a group run of the river so that everyone could get to know the lines, and then we did the race runs. The race was infuriating, but went well. The low levels meant there were unavoidable rocks everywhere, which meant lots of exhausting accellerating from standstill on the way down the river. In the end I avoided the rocks better than most people but still came home in second place, one second behind David Doyle. I guess more work will have to be put in before the next race! 

Nailing the boof on the second drop felt great! Photo by Barry Loughnane.

 After the race everyone paddled to the bottom of the river, I snagged a spin in Barry Loughnane's Zen (It goes well, it's not quite in it's element when there's no water in the river but it's super quick and grips nicely on eddylines!), and then word went around that the Flesk was running. So we went into full kayaker convoy mode and headed that direction, only getting slightly more lost than on the way towards the Owengar! We squeezed in two laps on the Flesk before it got dark, with a huge group of solid boaters. The levels weren't all-time, but it was a great crew to have on the water and a lot of fun was had!

The lead-in rapid before the big drop we did. This one is a lot of fun! Photo by Barry Loughnane.

After a pretty spectacular party on Saturday night we regrouped the next morning to have a meeting and come up with a plan for the day. A huge amount of rain had fallen overnight so the debate was to make the most of a guaranteed epic day on the Flesk, or go the opposite direction, go exploring and risk not paddling at all. In the end we had a democratic agreement to head for the O'Sullivans Cascades, we had all paddled the Flesk many times before and it was time to go looking for somewhere new! Although none of us had paddled the Cascades before, Tom O'Donoghue had been out for a look which was a great help when it came to finding the falls, which involves paddling across a lake and a hike up a hill through a forest. I could keep going but I'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking! There's a beautiful set of waterfalls up there, and we didn't even run the best of them! A trip back is definitely on the cards, when there's more water around and I've logged a bit more time building up skills on waterfalls! 

The cleanest of the big drops on the O'Sullivans Cascades. There's also an awesome triple-step drop that I really want to paddle sometime! Photo by Barry Loughnane.

By the Wednesday following that epic weekend, I had fully caught up on sleep and was starting to get tired of looking at the four walls of my office. By Thursday I had booked Friday off work and was wetting myself looking at the forecast that was coming together for the upcoming weekend! I made it to Limerick on Thursday in time to head to the UL pool session and after that was given no choice about heading to Costellos for the night! On Friday, the rain showed up, word went around and we headed to the Clare Glens for a couple of laps. It was my first time out on the river in a long time and a couple of the lads from Galway came down for the day. The standard of paddling on the water was the best I've seen in a long time, and it was great to watch everyone styling, boofing and freewheeling all around them! The highlight of the day was definitely seeing Mark Scanlon freewheeling Big Eas. I'm pretty sure no-one has tried that move before, and with good reason, the ledges on the way down are pretty scary! I've never done it before, and I'm not sure I will be trying it, but Scanlon nailed it no problem! After the Glens we headed up to Galway to drink some beer, make a plan for the next day once that was sorted we headed to the Roisin Dubh for the night. Which is pretty much the Costellos of Galway, it's brilliant! 

I'm still having trouble with embedding non-Youtube videos here, check this out instead! Big Eas Freewheel!

Despite the late night on Friday night, the potential for paddling some new rivers got us all out of bed bright and early the next morning and we headed towards county Mayo not sure exactly where we would end up boating. We started by checking out a potential first descent of a ditch out west but when we got there we decided there wasn't quite enough water to go for it. So we kept going towards the Seannafearruchain, which I wasn't disappointed about at all! Although it's not run very often, I have been hearing about this run for years, generally referred to as Little Norway, and it's been right at the top of the list of rivers I want to run since I ticked the Owengar off that list last year. On the hike up to the top of the river, which takes about an hour, it became obvious that this river wasn't going to disappoint! It's super steep, super continuous, super tight, and best of all there was a bit of water on it! It's the kind of river that would get cleaner with more water, but then it would get harder to get out of the water between rapids and eventually become unrunnable, long before the moves themselves become unmakable. As it was, the lack of eddies meant that we had to post people at the bottom of each rapid to catch people as they paddled past and help them out of the water! 

 
Barry Loughnane put together this video from the weekend, it really shows just how tight the Seannafarruchain is!

All was going well until we came across a drop-to-slide arrangement maybe a third of the way down the river. Although most of the group had the intellegence to walk around it, myself and Mark Scanlon took a look and decided to go for it. After looking at it individually, we both came up with totally different approaches to the drop. I decided it would be best to land on the slide nose-first, to eliminate the possibility of damaging my back by landing flat on the slab, while Mark decided the best idea was to land flat but leaning forward. In the end I was caught out by a horizontal ledge in the rock I was landing on, which brought my boat to a dead stop when I hit it. Check out the video below, it's pretty funny! Mark's line only went slightly better, when he landed his face hit the cockpit of his boat, bursting his lip and damaging his nose. The blood looked pretty impressive at the time, and his lip was pretty swollen afterwards, but not enough to stop him getting the shift that night so it's all good! The force of the impact when I landed bent the nose of my boat, smashed my footblock and sprained my ankle. Not a lot of fun, since it meant I had to walk down this hillside that had taken so much work to climb up in the first place, while watching the lads running epic rapids all the way down! I got lucky in fairness, to be able to walk out at all. It was the kind of crash that could have had much worst results! A week or two off to let the ankle recover and I'll be back to do the rest of that river, it looks like awesome craic! Since I had killed any chance of boating the next day, that evening we joined a gang of NUIG OFBs heading up to Leitrim to party with the rest of the club. Those guys certainly know how to party and they've got a great gang of people around at the moment, the night was great craic and I'm looking forward to getting out again over New Years!

Another link, I still cringe every time I see it! Ouch!

So that's about it at the moment! Plans for the next few weeks are contingent on how that ankle heals up, so I havn't made any yet. The next big-big event that's coming up is paddler's New Years, and I hope to be well back in action by then. Hopefully it won't take anywhere near that long, I reckon another week or so off and it should be all good. Fingers crossed! Once that sorts itself out the plan is to try to keep travelling to new rivers around the country, it's not so common for the time and the transport and the right people to all be available so I'm hoping to make the most of it! 

Last but not least! There really are some gorgeous drops in that forest! Photo by Barry Loughnane.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Where to start?!

So yeah, the last few weeks... The reason it's been so long since I posted anything is that I really don't know where to begin! My main worry about starting a grown-up job with an office and sensible people in a new place was that it would spell the end of paddling and other fun activities during the week. Somehow however, I managed to score a real engineering job, with flexi-time, in a place that can only be described as a playground! Starting with just one or two contacts around Killarney let me get involved in the weekly routine of yoga on Mondays and rock climbing on Wednesdays. Having the car has meant that I'm within striking distance of a multitude of different beaches, which is where I've ended up on most Tuesdays and Thursday evenings after work so far, with either a surf kayak or surf board in tow. Compared with college last year and being stuck in a lab doing projects until all hours every night, the last couple of weeks has been like a holiday! 

I've been enjoying taking some time away from paddling recently. Around here there's always something fun to do, no matter what the weather is like! Photo by ULWC.


For the first couple of weeks after arriving home from Canada and starting work, my focus was on getting used to the surf kayak again in preparation for the Irish Open in Easky two weeks ago. After a couple of sketchy rolls due to getting lazy during my time in the playboat, it was really exciting to feel how much my awareness of what the boat was doing around me had improved during the time in Canada. This was most noticeable while taking beatings in big surf but I'm guessing that it has to help while surfing a wave as well! While getting used to the boat again, I also played around with the fin set-up a bit and changed it to suit Irish style waves as opposed to the unpredictable, sectiony beach break that we were surfing in Spain. By the time I headed up to Easky the fin black magic was working well and my Phantom was paddling like there was a propellor on the back! Throughout all of this messing with fins the only thing I have learned is that I know nothing about fin set-ups and the boat kept reacting to changes in ways I didn't expect! Through a process of trial and error I'm coming close to the best set-up for that boat now though and it's feckin ripping! 

One of the smaller waves to come through that day; still nice and rippable! Photo by Aisling Griffin.


Despite a mediocre surf forecast we arrived in Easky to find the reef doing a great job of hoovering up every scrap of swell in the north Atlantic and breaking at a beautiful 5-6 foot, with a better shape to the wave than Easky normally has due to a couple of the different banks linking up together on the better sets. Definitely a more welcoming sight on a Saturday morning than the 10-12ft surf we've had for previous opens, even though the photos aren't quite as awesome! There was a turn-out to match the waves, with almost 60 entries across long boat, short boat and waveski. There were lots of relatively new faces around as well, which is a great sign for the progression of the sport over the next few years. Some of the juniors especially; Matthew, Emil,  Jamie and Conor; are already pushing the rest of us to up our game to try to stay ahead of them. In terms of competition, the day really couldn't have gone any better. It was one of those days where everything happened perfectly, all the sets arrived when I was in the right place, all of my waves walled up beautifully while other people were struggling for speed on fat shoulders and I won all bar one heat all day. It was one of those days where the waves I was getting were so fun that I pretty much forgot about the competition and just let loose, and I ended up doing the double with first places in both long boat and short boat! Delighted, winning the Open has been a goal of mine for a couple of years now and taking both classes in the same year is a pretty good way to do it! 

First place prizes in both long boat and short boat, mens and open divisions. Pretty good haul for the weekend!

After the open I was able to head back to Kerry and forget about competition for a while. Since then I've been windsurfing a bit, board surfing quite a lot, and generally keeping as busy as possible from 4.30 onwards every day! Crana kayak fest was always on the horizon, but with eight hours of driving between there and home I was never seriously considering going. That is, until I saw the weather forecast for the weekend and realised there wasn't going to be any wind, surf or water in the southern end of the country! I still wasn't tempted to make the trip until the day before when I was held back in work late and thanks to flexi-time that meant I was able to take the Monday after the event off work, allowing me to break the journey home into two stints. So at the last possible minute I was left ringing around the contacts, figuring out who was heading up from Limerick that I could hop in with (Thanks Diarmuid and Shane! ULKC to the rescue again!) and what the actual plan was for the weekend. In the end I spent the two days of the event running freestyle coaching sessions and a competition on a small, shallow feature in Buncrana. Despite the feature not having a lot of potential for big moves, it was great craic helping people get the basics of surfing and spinning dialled in, and everyone on the water also seemed to really enjoy the sessions. After the coaching work was done, it was competition time! 

For sheer fun it's hard to beat a small clean day on a longboard! Photo by ULWC.


The highlights of the Crana kayak weekend are the Palm/Wavesport Night-Time time trial on 'the Claw', and Sunday's expert boaterX! After all of the coaching sessions are over and the beginner and intermediate competitions in all the different disciplines are finished, the gloves come off and battle begins! The Claw is a tricky enough rapid to hit a clean line on at the best of times, and when running it at night or as part of a boaterX race the chances of some entertaining carnage increase exponentially! In the end, the crowds of people gathered around the rapid more than got their fill of carnage at both events, with plenty of people misjudging the 6-inch wide line and being sent down either the 'room of doom' on river right or pinballing off the rocks on river left. This year there was a change to the time trial course, with a 40m flatwater sprint and slalom pole between the bottom of the claw and the finish line. This was definitely beneficial to me, I made a slight mistake on the claw and got slowed down by a rock half way down the rapid. However the flatwater section gave me a chance to pull back some time and I ended up coming third overall, behind some seriously impressive lines from Barry Loughnane and Cian McNally. The boaterX the following afternoon was even more entertaining. After a round of 6-person heats, the first person in each went through to an "A" final and the second went into the "B" final. It's an unforgiving format considering the unpredictability of boaterX but it really leads to some all-or-nothing racing for that top spot. The action gets even more exciting in the finals; there were eight people in each, all seriously fast boaters and all of them really wanted that top spot! Right from the moment the final race started everyone was taking full advantage of the lack of rules in boaterX and tearing strips off each other! Somehow, at the end of all the carnage I finished the A final in third place, which isn't a bad result considering the level of chaos that happened in the race! Two third places isn't quite the same as the surf kayak results a few weeks previously but it's still a good start to the creek boat racing season. It looks like I'll have to do a bit of training if I want to come out on top at the end of the league again though! 

Hot on Odhran McNally's heels at Crana last weekend. Eight people running the Claw at a time led to some great entertainment! Photo by Adrian Durrant.


So that's pretty much everything that I've been putting off writing about recently! The hour is changing soon which will put an end to the after work surf sessions, but there's also a whole pile of rain forecast so it looks like the winter creeking season is about to kick off. Along with more rock climbing and yoga I'd say there'll be more than enough to do to keep me busy around here. At the same time I've got 40 hours a week to earn some cash, figure out where in the world I want to paddle next and ponder ways of doing outdoor sports for a living. It doesn't sound like a bad way to spend a winter! See ye all at the next event!

Congrats to Phil Connolly and Odhran McNally for taking first and second in the boaterX, it was a seriously tough race! Photo by Maria McGivern McNally.

Wednesday, September 16, 2015

Moving With the Flow



 
So since the last update, a few things have changed! Besides the whole business of a freestyle world championships, which I'll start on in a minute, since coming home I have moved house, started a new job and am now working on catching up on missed sleep and figuring out what there is to do in Killorglin in the evenings after work! If anyone is in the area and up for doing stuff let me know! The trip to Canada for the freestyle world championships was such an awesome couple of weeks that I don't know where to start. This post might turn into a bit of a ramble as I try to get through all the things that I want to say about it!

I cannot say enough good things about this group of people! From kayaking to cooking, cleaning, supporting and chilling out, it's the people that make or break every trip and this one was an epic one! Picture by Jack Ledwith.


I was the first of the Irish to reach the Ottawa valley by a couple of days. I arrived a few days before the official shuttle bus to Garburator started running, planning to rely on the generosity of other paddlers to get to and from the rivers. Kayakers being the charitible bunch that they are this was no problem, the English juniors were doing the same thing and paddler, photographer and all-round legend Philip Robert kindly drove all of us around until the official shuttle started, wedged into the back of his 'Boof Bus' like sardines! When the official shuttle started it wasn't the end of the crammed journeys, by this time the German team had shown up and a couple of times there were Irish, English, Aussies and a whole pile of Germans hoping to get the same mini-bus back to Wilderness Tours. I think the record we hit was 17 people in the back of a 9-seater mini-bus for one trip which was very entertaining! 

The legendary Boof Bus! Photo by Philip Robert


Wilderness Tours, one of the rafting companies on the Ottawa, were the main sponsor of the event and provided most of the funding needed to run an international competition in the middle of nowhere. They also looked after us extremily well while we were there, providing free camping for competitors for the duration of the trip and setting up a meal plan which gave us three all-you-can-eat meals a day for a very reasonable cost. The staff there were amazing, they did most of the setting up of the event venue and looked after us really well while we were there. All in all a huge shout-out is due to Wilderness Tours for everything they did for us, it's really appreciated! The best thing about this meal plan was that it meant that three times a day you were going for food with all the other paddlers who were camped out at WT. This was a great opportunity to get to know loads of kayakers from all over the world, and following a couple of beers led to the founding of Team Plastic, which I'll talk more about later! 

The bit of orange duct tape made it a lot easier to find my boat among the piles of green Rockstars stashed at Garb. It stands out pretty well in photos too! Photo by Robert Kierans.


The Wave... Where to start?! Garburator is awesome, violent, scary, dangerous and a lot of fun all at the same time! When I arrived first most of the paddlers who had been there for a while were held together with the medical equivelant of duct tape! Damaged backs and shoulders were the most common complaints, including at least one person who had dislocated a shoulder on Garb and was holding it in with tape, along with many cases of tendonitis due to how tight people were having to hold onto their paddles on the wave. Despite the huge number of injuries going around, very few people were taking any time off the water to recover, preferring instead to rely on huge amounts of ibubrofen to keep them paddling and training coming up to the comp. Ignoring the risk of getting injured, Garb is epic! The huge foampile means that it's incredibly retentive for a wave of that size, and the speed of the oncoming green water means that it's possible to get huge air. The lack of any kind of green face makes it difficult to consistently time a bounce, but this proved to be no problem to the guys at the top of the field. It's one thing to watch the likes of Nick, Dane, Matt, Bren and Quim throwing huge moves in videos online but it's even more impressive to see how consistently they can throw huge rides on an extremily tricky feature. The biggest difference between those guys and the rest of the competition is that everyone else takes a couple of passes on the wave before they throw a big move, while the top guys are throwing moves on almost every pass. The most impressive thing about watching Dane paddle is that he misses less passes than anyone else, as well as the moves that he throws invariably being huge! That's the next thing on the list of stuff to work on now that I'm back in Ireland; consistency!  

The amplitude that some of the guys are getting is just ridiculus! Photo by Philip Robert

 As well as getting the hang of a wave that was incredibly different to anything I had surfed before, I also had a new boat to get used to over there. A huge thanks to Emily and the rest of the team at Jackson Kayak for kitting us out with the brand new 2016 Rockstars for the competition! Coming from the Project 52 the Rockstar took a bit of getting used to; thanks to the more rounded rail profile it handles very differently on a wave but the same rounded rail makes it far more forgiving and less likely to catch an edge and flush when landing moves. The short tail makes it a little more twitchy when paddling down river but comes around super-easily on moves like Helixes. I have always been quite critical of Jackson Kayak's outfitting, as I have always found it gave me a very poor connection to the boat when paddling other people's, and the backrest nearly always popped when I tried to loop. It turns out that almost everyone whose boat's I have paddled just had them set up terribly badly! Once set up correctly, with all the air sucked out of the Sweet-Cheeks and Happy Feet (very important!!), they form nice rigid pads which are perfectly fitted to your body! My back-rest also hasn't ever slipped on me so far, so it looks like the ropes just need to be replaced when they start to wear out. The Rockstar is by far the most comfortable playboat that I have paddled, which is pretty good considering I had the Project for six years and thought I had it set-up perfectly! The tweaked volume distribution has made it incredibly easy to throw around on flatwater, especially if you're towards the top of the weight range like me. There's still enough volume around the middle to make it loop pretty big, and I'm really looking forward to taking it to Tuam to see how it goes in a hole. The competition spec boats we were given are also ridiculusly light, which helps to make everything easier. I passed the boat around to a few people at some ULKC pool sessions last week, and heard the phrase 'best boat I've ever paddled' at least once! If you're in the market for a new boat it's definitely one to demo, and if anyone in Ireland wants to try mine out I'm sure we can arrange something.


Yeah, that new boat goes! Photo by Philip Robert.


Obviously, the reason I headed out to Canada two weeks before team training started was to try to get as much time on the wave as possible before the comp started. This worked out really well, when I got there first the eddy was relatively quiet and I would simply chill out at Garb all day and hop on the water every time there were less than ten people in the line. This way I was doing up to five or six short sessions every day, which is definitely the way to go when training on a feature as physical as Garb. After four or five rides the consistency would start to go downhill and I would start making mistakes and flushing on moves that I really shouldn't be flushing on. Progress was slow but steady, and everyone in the eddy was real friendly and always up for giving advice with things like airscrew and pan-am techniques. Gradually over the two weeks before team training the eddy started to fill up and eventually it was quiet whenever there were less than 20 people in the water! A 20 minute wait between rides isn't ideal for learning new moves so it was definitely good to have the couple of weeks of training done before then! The rest of the Irish team showed up in bits and pieces in the two weeks coming up to the comp. Most of the team had been out to the Ottawa before and it showed. Tom Dunphy has been training hard on the Ottawa all summer and was ripping by the time I got there, working on a ride that would have put him right up at the top end of the competition if it came together for him on the day. The two Kellehers and Shane Little were also super impressive, taking no time at all to get used to the wave and going huge on it right from the time they arrived. In the end, the experience that Len and Moe brought with them paid off, with both of them just missing out on the next round by a couple of places. 

Len Kelleher, doing what he does best! Photo by Philip Robert.

 I had a shaky week or so before the competition, when my paddling seemed to be getting worse and worse no matter how hard I tried to improve it, and no matter what crazy times of day I tried to get some time on the wave (a couple of 3am and 5am sessions were done to try and beat the crowds, and the wave was nearly always busy!). It got so bad that at one point I was only able to get one or two moves in every ride before flushing and in the end, with just three days to go before the competition I decided that my body must just be tired out from too much paddling. I made the decision to take two full days off to recover, which took me up untill the morning of prelims. I didn't paddle in the last team training session, didn't paddle in the allotted training session the night before prelims and didn't paddle Garb at all the morning of the competition. I made it to the morning of prelims feeling fresh and relaxed, and went for a nice long warm-up session directly before the heat. Although I had a potential ride in my head that could scrape 1000 points if everything went perfectly to plan, I went into prelims praying that I would stick more than two tricks in each ride! My plan for the competition was to take it easy for the first ride and use it to get used to the wave again after the couple of days off, take two rides to try and hit my planned ride and have one ride at the end left to go for broke. 

Thankfully, it all kind of came together in the end! Photo by Philip Robert.

 In the end, as soon as I dropped into the wave for my first ride and threw a blunt or two, a safety boater from the Esprit rafting company paddled down the wave in front of me, despite an agreement being in place that they would only paddle down between rides. Thankfully, the competition organisers were very understanding and offered to wipe my first ride from the record, so no harm done! ...except to that safety boater, if I ever meet him again. The next couple of rides went more-or-less as I had hoped. I took it handy, turned down passes if they didn't feel right and although this stopped me from getting anywhere near the 1000 point mark, I did manage to stay on the wave for the full 45 seconds each time and get a couple of solid moves in. In my last, go-for-broke ride I threw the only entry-move of the competition and got a couple of more moves in before rushing things too much and flushing on a Helix. In the end the two highest rides were only enough to leave me in 35th place with a combined score of around 750 points, not enough to qualify but I'm happy with it all the same. I had a whole lot of fun on competition day, my gamble of skipping a couple of training sessions paid off and I paddled much better than I did in the few days leading up to the event. Now I have a benchmark that I'm going to have to try and beat at the next worlds, so it's time to go away and learn to hole-boat!

Pushing hard for a Pan-Am! Photo by Philip Robert.


After prelims were over it was time for the partying to begin! Over the next few days we watched some of the competition, paddled the river a few times and hung out and partied with all the rest of the competitors who were no longer part of the action. One of the things that we noticed while hanging around and watching the rest of the competition was that all of the top guys are part of team Jackson Kayak, team Adidas, team Red-Bull etc etc etc or someone else who is paying them a wage to go kayaking. They are legitimate athletes and kayak at a level that is all but impossible for those of us who work all week to fund the next kayaking trip to reach. Those guys all paddle carbon boats and spend their time travelling to one perfect river to the next. This all inspired a bit of lifestyle and boat envy from those of us watching the competition from the sidelines, and someone suggested that what the world needs is a team for those of us who paddle on local, average features as often as possible, go to competitions to meet people and have some fun and generally do the best we can with what we've got. There could only be one name for a team like this! What started as a joke suggestion got us talking about 'what ifs', and now there is a facebook group and stickers. It doesn't pay a wage but it's already led to some entertaining banter with people asking what the hell is this shite! So give us a like at Team Plastic, I've no idea what we're going to do next or where it's going to go from here, but it'll definitely be a bit of a laugh and be relevant to anyone who enjoys going kayaking whenever they can!

James Rowlinson; sick paddler, all-round nice guy and Team Plastic founder not letting his plastic boat or broken and taped body hold him back at all! Photo by Philip Robert.


Saturday, August 29, 2015

Nearly There...

Team training is finished, the opening ceremony is tomorrow and the final preparations for the comp are being made! We had a productive time at the final team training session this afternoon, everyone has the wave pretty much dialled in by now and some of the Irish guys are going huge. Shane Little in particular has a couple of big moves that he is throwing down pretty consistently, while the Kelleher brothers are probably less consistent but both are throwing some huge front and back Pan-Ams which will get them big scores in competition. The juniors are also doing great, the extra time that they have spent out here is really showing and they are consistently throwing down some great blunts and back blunts, along with the occasional Pan-Am. My own paddling is still all over the place, I'm occasionally getting some nice helixes, Pan-Ams and air screws but struggling to get them all into one ride. Fingers crossed it will all come together on the day of the competition! Bar the top five or ten competitors who are consistently throwing down ridiculous rides, Garb is so fast and foamy that everyone else seems to be struggling to lay down a couple of big moves in a row. It looks like it's all to play for on competition day!

Thankfully, it looks like there's going to be a lot more down-time at this comp than we got over in Spain! A few of the lads are gone to a demolition derby in Cobden and there's a paddling movie night at Wilderness Tours tonight, tomorrow the organisers are feeding everyone after the opening ceremony and the following couple of evenings all seem to have  some kind of entertainment lined up. So it looks like it's going to be a great comp, regardless of if it ends with the losers party on Friday night or Finals on Saturday! The comp kicks off with Squirt on Monday and the Men's K1 prelims are on Wednesday. It's all going to be streamed live here so keep an eye out!


Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Update from the Ottawa


The Irish team is in town! After a couple of days hanging around Garb by myself and getting to know all of the Aussie, English and German paddlers who also arrived early the Irish team started to trickle in. By now we're almost all here and set up with our own luxury log cabin and transport, naturally including one all-American, 5L Ford F150 pick-up truck! It can only carry marginally more people and boats than my Ford Fiesta but you know, when in Rome and all that... Team training kicked off two days ago and it's going great so far. The two Kellehers especially hopped on the wave and immediately looked like they had been here for weeks with some huge blunts, pan-ams and back blunts! Tom Dunphy is also looking really strong, the amount of time that he has put in on Garb over the last few months is really showing. The rest of the team are working hard to catch up, starting with getting the feel of throwing moves on a totally new feature and then putting those moves into a ride that offers the potential for scoring maximum points in competition.

I have a bit of a head start and the competition ride is starting to come together. It's not as consistent as I would like yet but we have another week before men's prelims. Coming out a few weeks early was definitely a good call; waiting times for a ride on the wave are over 20 minutes outside team training times, and the team training slot only guarantees around 5 rides on the wave per day. Not a lot of time for learning moves! At the same time, the wave is so physical that there's only so much paddling that the body can take in a day. Huge numbers of paddlers here are carrying back and shoulder injuries and relying on medical grade duct-tape to hold them together on the wave. So the goal for everyone at this stage is to polish off the ride while tapering down the training to minimise the risk of getting injured, and also be as fresh as possible when the competition starts. Fingers crossed it'll all go to plan! Garb is awesome; super fast, fairly retentive and there's the potential for big air when everything goes right. It's so big and foamy that it's quite difficult to land moves consistently but the top couple of paddlers are having no problems. The winning ride will most likely contain two air screws, four pan-ams, two helixes, two pistol flips and a couple of blunts! There are a few paddlers landing that kind of ride in training and the title will probably go to whoever can get the most huge and clean bonuses.


There's a great vibe around the campsite here and it's really started to fill up in the last couple of days. Everyone is pretty chilled out about the comp and up for having the craic in the evenings; there's been some great multi-national games of soccer, volleyball and pool so far, as well as one or two pretty full-on parties! Loads of different countries are represented which is great to see and the topic of conversation has generally revolved around ripping the piss out of each other's accents and national stereotypes! The comp kicks off on Sunday, and will be streamed live. It's going to be epic to watch, the likes of Dane Jackson, Matt Doumoulin, Bren Orton and a bunch of others have been going huge in training so definitely check it out!

For another paddler's perspective on the worlds to date check out James Rowlinson's blog at http://shenanteryakking.blogspot.ca/. It's got some great descriptions of Garb and everything else we've been getting up to recently!

Wednesday, August 12, 2015

Countdown to Canada!

So the kayaking gear is drying out, and pretty much everything else that I own is in various piles while I figure out how to pack it all... looks like it's time for another World Championships! I've spent the last week or two back on the west coast of Ireland with the tent, hunting for surf in order to squeeze in some last minute training before flying out. No more bike transport for me this time; I start a job soon after I get back in Septemer which I'll need a car for, so I cleared out the bank accounts, borrowed some money from the parents and ended up with an electric blue Ford Fiesta! The day after picking up the car I was off on a 500km road trip around the south-west coast of Ireland; camping, fishing, snorkelling, meeting up with friends and of course kayaking. 

Of course, one of the first things I did with the new car was test out how it goes off-road! Answer; not well at all! The old Project 52 does fit in well though, along with enough other toys to keep me entertained for a few days! Thanks to the two Anthonys for the push and Aisling Griffin for the photo! 

In keeping with the rest of the summer, the last few weeks have been pretty terrible for surf and the waves that I have found havn't been ideal training for a big, powerful Canadian river wave! Looking at videos of Garb that other competitors have been uploading over the last couple of days it's going to be a serious step up in terms of power and will be great fun to try and learn to control! Irish junior team members Rob Kierans and Jack Ledwith are out there already and seem to be doing a great job of dialling the wave in so hopefully it will all come together in the end. As well as having a new wave to get the hang of, I've decided it's finally time to move on from the Project 52 and I'm picking up a shiny new 2016 Jackson Kayaks Rockstar when I get there. I'm sure it'll take a couple of sessions to catch up on about ten years of boat development but by all accounts the boat is ripping it up out there and I'm really looking forward to getting to know it! 

 As a last minute fundraiser the Irish freestyle team are holding a comedy gig in the Laughter Lounge in Dublin on Thursday. It promises to be a great night out as well as generating a couple of more euro to put towards accommodation and stuff so if anyone is free on Thursday would be great to see you there!

So that's about it for the moment. I'm flying out from Dublin on Friday morning and will hopefully be in town on Thursday for the comedy gig. The competition will be streamed live here so if you're free between the 30th of August and the 5th of September make sure to check it out! I'll see if I can update this while I'm out there but since I havn't been able to get another smartphone after mine got fried in Spain I've a feeling I won't be able to. So keep the fingers crossed for some respectable results in Canada and I'll definitely get another update put up here very soon after we get back!

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Surf Kayak World Championships Round Up


Pantin is a pretty cool looking spot! Photo by Donie McLoughlin.


So, as anyone who keeps an eye on this might have guessed, we have been back from Spain for a while now! My plan to keep this updated while I was over there didn't really work out, since my phone got fried by a dodgy adaptor and I had no other way of getting online. The time since arriving back in Ireland has been spent chilling out, surfing, fishing, windsurfing, doing a bit of freestyle training and van shopping (although that plan just hit a major speed-bump; pretty disappointing since I've been looking forward to owning a van for years!) and I guess it's time I put a few words together about the surf worlds! The trip was a great experience, with lots of ups, a few downs and lots of time spent hanging out with some really cool people!

The team at the opening ceremony and parade. Looking flash in the team gear that Darragh Walsh sorted for us! 

Before the competition started we had a few days to get to know the wave where the competition was going to be held and acquaint ourselves with the layout of the area where we were staying. The break at Pantin is awesome; it's easy to see why they have a WQS competition there every year! The bay hoovers up an incredible amount of swell, and directs it towards a sandbar beside a cliff which creates a decent wave at virtually all stages of the tide. Directly inside the main peak is a small island, which creates a deep channel between itself and the cliff and gives an easy route to paddle out. This channel stays totally clear on all but the biggest days, and even then it takes most of the difficulty out of paddling out which is relatively unusual for a European beach break! On the good days the wave started from a well-defined take-off spot, built up into a steep, fast walling section, backed off a little giving time for a few cutbacks and finally walled up again before closing out. It's a great wave that gives opportunities for pretty much the full range of manouvers and there was some seriously impressive surfing done during the week! The downside of such a good break in the middle of summer is of course the crowds. The huge influx of kayakers for the competition created tension with the local board surfers, and some other countries appeared to play by slightly different priority rules than we do which lead to several verbal disagreements on the water. Thankfully verbal disagreements were as far as it went; there were no collisions and no injuries so it was all good at the end of the day!

We got a couple of pretty big days! Great fun, and in competition you get to surf it with just three other people on the water! Photo by Aisling Griffin. 

Bar the first few days on the water, the rest of the event ran with an incredibly relaxed atmosphere. The event schedule each day was finalised at pretty late notice, which required a bit of flexibility from competitors and resulted in a lot of early mornings, but in fairness the event organisers were equally flexible. They would make sure that all competitors were on the water before starting heats and there was no hesitation in pausing the competition if two competitors needed to swap a boat between heats, which is very unusual at a world championships. They also looked after us really well during the week, providing food on a couple of evenings which usually consisted of great seafood, paella and tapas. At the team competition prize-giving in As Pontes there was a dinner of Octopus and free-flowing wine, and coincidentally there was a medieval themed party in the town that evening. All of this led to a ridiculous night spent running around a Spanish town chatting to people dressed in crazy outfits, which turned out to be deadly craic!

Bouncing around at the start of a pretty mental night in As Pontes! Photo by Donie McLoughlin. 

The surf kayak world championships consists of two separate competitions; an individual competition and a team competition which took place on alternate days during the week. The individual competition kicked off the event and used an unusual format. The usual system of four-person, 20 minute heats was used but instead of the top two people from each heat going into the next round as normally happens only the top person went through. The other three people went into a reperchage round, where again only the top person from each four-man heat stayed in the competition. This made it extremely tough to progress through the competition, and after a couple of second places and third places and coming up against the eventual world champions in both long and short boat I was out of the competition after the reps. This definitely wasn't the result I was hoping for but oh well, time to get back to training and start looking forward to NI 2017!

I paddled Ant's Ride IC boat a good bit out there which was a bit of a change from the Trident I'm used to. It went great though, and is surprisingly easy to control at the top of the wave! Photo by Donie McLoughlin.

Fortunately, the team event went much better! Although we have put a huge amount of work in over the last few years running intro events and training weekends and trying to build up the team as much as possible, many members of the team hadn't been surf kayaking for very long before going to Spain. We went over expecting to have a good time and learn a lot, but had no idea how the competition was going to go. The way the team competition was run was the teams were divided into two groups of four, and you competed against three other countries over two days. Heats were made up containing one paddler from each country and points allocated for each paddler's position in each heat; the country with the lowest number of points at the end of the day wins! In the end all of the team paddled to their potential or even better in that team event and we finished up in second place in the group. The top two countries from each group went into the team finals at the end of the week, which ended up being Euskadi, England, Wales and ourselves. Even though we were fairly well outclassed on team finals day and ended up in fourth position, we were happy to have gone that far and were delighted with the result, as you can tell from the pictures of the prize giving ceremony!

Very happy with our trophy, medals and fourth place finish at Pantin! 


So, that pretty much sums up how the week went! Lots of surfing, lots of good food, sunshine and some great parties! The location of the next world championships has been announced as Northern Ireland, 2017. This gives us an incredible opportunity to start building a team early and try to challenge the higher ranks of that podium next time round. If anyone wants to get involved and be part of the squad, just keep an eye on Paddlesurf Ireland on facebook and start showing up to events. We also need people to give a hand with organising and running events so if you're up for getting involved with that side of things just let us know. If anyone has any questions about what's involved then give me a shout! I want to say a huge thanks to Aisling Griffin and Mike Barry for all the work that they've put into Paddlesurf Ireland over the last couple of years. It's been a lot of hassle, taken a lot of time and effort and this year's team really wouldn't have come together without them. Hopefully seeing the team in action and paddling well over in Spain was some bit of payback for all the work that has gone in!

Edu, the eventual winner throwing a mid face slash. Regardless of the criteria being used the top surfers will adjust their surfing to suit and still come out on top, but I think this kind of thing gets repetitive and doesn't fulfill the criteria of 'radical, controlled manuvers in the critical section of the wave' as well as the regular, 'short' HP boat style of surfing. Photo by Donie McLoughlin. 


 One last point that I think is worth discussing before finishing up... What became very clear at Pantin was the contrast in surfing styles between the regular HP surfkayaks and the longer HP surfkayaks. Longer boats have always had an advantage in competition due to being faster to paddle out and being more capable in either very big or very small surf. However, they generally don't perform off-the lip turns in the critical section of the wave and are usually surfed with a style of surfing that uses lots of slashy cutbacks instead of big top to bottom turns. I don't know what other people think, but personally I find this style of surfing incredibly repetitive and boring to watch. Additionally, in my opinion this style of surfing lacks any kind of flow, variety, innovation or commitment; therefore, going by the criteria here: WSL Criteria, this style of surfing shouldn't score highly in competition. I think that surf boards are at the pinnacle of functional surfing, and that is the style of riding that we should be trying to emulate in our kayaks. Unfortunately, at Pantin the mid-face tail-slashy style of surfing appeared to be strongly favoured by the judges. I watched several heats containing contrasting styles and consistantly the guys throwing repetitive tail-slashes out-scored the guys surfing from top to bottom and throwing their turns off the lip of the wave; the results were consistently very different to how I would have called it if I was judging. Now I'm not against the occasional turn being a big slash in the face of the wave, but effectively the competition became a freestyle competition to see who could throw the most slashes in a row and finish it off with a cartwheel. I'm not saying that the results would have been different if the judging was different, as the top guys are capable of surfing with whatever style they want and have a choice of boats to use, however I am saying that the last few rounds of the competition would have been far more entertaining to watch, with far more airs and big lip turns, if the judges hadn't been scoring that slashy, stop-start style of surfing so highly. To me, the best surfing of the event was done by the likes of Philip Watson, Darren Bason, Julen Arrizabalaga and Xabier Olano, who were throwing tight bottom turns, off the lip top top turns, airs and roundhouse cutbacks, as well as the occasional slashed turn. I would love to hear other people's opinions on this so if you have any opinions on the topic then please throw me a facebook message. But personally I hope that something happens between now and the Northern Ireland worlds that brings surf kayaking back in line with waveski and board surfing's values of big carving turns performed in, or above, the most critical section of the wave.


Friday, June 26, 2015

Buenos Dias!



After a long day we are currently sitting in our awesome Spanish villa, enjoying a beer and feeling pretty stuffed after the pizzas we had for dinner!

After a day of travelling, made slightly stressful by having to ensure that the composite boats made it in one piece, we started the trip the best way possible with a couple of hours of evening surfing in small, clean waves, in sunshine and warm water! The surf forecast here is looking incredibly consistent so I'm really looking forward to the next few days of dialling in the waves and scoping out the standard of the competition!

Time to get some sleep! The plan is to keep this updated over the next couple of weeks, hopefully I'll keep finding time to throw something up here and there so keep an eye out! 

Sunday, June 21, 2015

Final Countdown!!

So the training is done, moves are down, fitness is as good as it's going to get...all that's left to do is dry off the gear, take a few days to chill out and then board a plane to Spain for World Championships number one; surf kayaking! 

I'm working on getting those lip moves a little higher, it's slow progress! Photo by Mike Barry.

Since the last update, after I had spent two weeks battling onshore winds before my tent eventually ripped in half in a storm, things have thankfully taken a turn for the better! Shortly after running away from Kerry the first time I was back there with Sheelagh, another member of the Irish Surf Kayak team who kindly lent me a tent and agreed to drive me around to go surfing! Thankfully this time the waves improved, the wind swung offshore and the sun came out so the training could really start in earnest! Aisling, Mick and Ant from the surf team also showed up at various stages and it was great to get some feedback going between everyone which really helped to develop the different moves that everyone was working on.

Sun, surf, Nissan Micra... What more do you need?!

Although we headed up to Clare for a bit of variety in the surf, and to swing by the Doolin Trad Music Festival, persistant westerly winds and a mediocre swell meant that the reefs we were hoping to get to surf never really worked. We kept busy all the same with things like rock climbing, caving and fishing but eventually called it quits and headed back to Kerry, where the curving beach of Brandon Bay picks up a lot of swell and offers more choices in westerly winds. In the end it was a great call and we got a few more days of great waves before deciding it was time to head back home and start preparing for the trip to Spain! 

So that's where things are at right now! The gear is outside drying off, the clothes are in the wash and I'm starting to really get excited about Spain! A few days now and we'll be chilling out in the sun, sipping cold beers after surfing in a new country; I can't feckin wait! 

In terms of life off the water over the last few weeks, one thing that's everywhere in the Brandon Bay area is really cool camper vans, from all over Ireland, the UK and even further afield; especially France, Germany and the Netherlands. Some of these vans have had awesome conversion jobs done to them and along with my experiences in the tent have really got me thinking about doing my one one over the next few months. Does anyone know of any companies who might be interested in buying advertising space on the side of a van that will travel to the majority of kayaking events in Ireland over the next few years?! The people who have brought all these great vans to Kerry, attracted by the surfing, windsurfing and relaxed pace of life down there, are all great to chat to and inspire great ideas for road-trips to the likes of Morocco and Eastern Europe! So any time over the next few days that isn't spent packing for Spain will probably be spent sketching ideas for the inside of a camper van and dreaming of the places that could be visited once it's finished!

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Some Things Just Don't Work Out...

So you're out of practise and out of shape after final year in college, you've got two World Championships to train for, cash reserves are pretty scarce from funding trips to said competitions and you don't own a car...what to do? Easy, head to the west coast of Ireland with a tent, bike and surf kayak and spend as much time on the water as humanly posssible! What could possibly go wrong...

So that's what I did when exams were over and I had finished my end-of-college partying. Since there was the possibility of getting the odd day's work in Castlegregory and it has some of the most consistent surf in Ireland that's where I headed. I set up camp in a remote-ish sand dune, right beside the surf of Brandon bay and within cycling distance of a shop, toilets and other essentials. The first few days went to plan, I got out surf kayaking every day in mediocre onshore conditions, and whenever I wasn't on the water I was cycling, running or fishing; generally getting fit again and chilling out after a pretty hectic final few weeks in college. I also did a few hours work here and there running kayaking sessions for Jamie Knox Watersports, which was good fun and a nice injection of cash into the wallet. So far so good, I had everything I needed and there was no reason why I couldn't stay there until it was time to head to Spain for the surf kayak worlds.

Unfortunately the Irish summer weather had other ideas. Firstly the wind came up and the swell dropped off, meaning that opportunities for surf kayak training became extremely limited. This wasn't all bad news. I started windsurfing last year with the UL club, and between the UL people's and Jamie Knox's expert tuition I've been progressing and starting to fall in love with the feeling of flying that you get when you're up at full speed and planing across the surface of the water. Jamie Knox had said that whenever he had groups on the water for activities I could take a set of windsurfing kit out for a spin so when the wind started to pick up towards the start of last week I started having some awesome windsurfing sessions. Over the two weeks I was there I went from being just about able to get the board up and planing to being able to consistantly hold the board there with some element of control. So despite the lack of surf kayaking I was happy enough to hang around and wait for the surf to improve, windsurf all the time, and cycle as much as possible to keep the fitness going in the right direction. 

As soon as predictions for Monday's weather started showing up on the forecast sites it was obvious that it was going to have an effect on my life in the tent. Windguru was showing 100 km/h winds and 8.5 mm of rain for Sunday afternoon, which pretty much made it a duvet and movie day! My tent was nicely tucked away behind a sand dune and had been very well sheltered from some strong westerly winds earlier on in the week, so I stocked up on chocolate and biscuits was happy enough to wait out the storm in relative peace. However on Monday the winds swung around south-westerly, which meant that they blew almost unobstructed around my protective sand-dune and struck my tent at an awkward angle. I spent several hours in the tent, holding it up as best I could and reinforcing it with paddles and other gear as much as possible but unfortunately just before the storm was due to peak it all became too much. My lovely little red tent, which has served me well on many journeys around Ireland, several trips to Europe and a month in Uganda was obviously weakened by all the exposure to the sun and developed a small split beside one of the poles. I went out to try to reinforce it with duct-tape but with no luck, the tent was too wet and the wind too strong for duct-tape to have any hope of staying in place. There was nothing I could do except lie in the tent and watch as the small split grew and grew and eventually split the entire tent clean in two. 

So that was the end of that! I had to wait out the rest of the storm and bail out back to Limerick, to dry out all my belongings and come up with a new plan. So that's where I'm at now, with my gear almost dry, last week's sun and wind-burn nearly healed and getting itchy feet to get back on the water. With a new tent and a slightly better weather forecast I would head back to Castlegregory in a heartbeat as it really had everything I needed to survive for an extended period of time and maximise the amount of training I could do but we'll see what happens. I need a new tent before I head to Canada in August so if anyone has any suggestions for a two-man tent that has lots of room for gear and is good in storms let me hear them!

If anyone is looking for a new sport that gives a similar aaargh-I'm-flying feeling to kayaking or mountain biking, without mountain-biking's risk of colliding with a tree or rock and mangling yourself, then I highly recommend giving windsurfing a go! It can take a little bit of time to get the hang of it, and can be frustrating until you do, but my god is it worth the effort! If you decide to give it a try then go check out www.jamieknox.com. The best tuition from a champion windsurfer and passionate teacher, loads of great kit and a choice of locations nearby to make the most of the conditions on the day. What more could you ask for? I plan to keep it up over the next while, with the eventual goal of getting good enough to try wave-sailing! Combining windsurfing with waves and a big sail to prolong the air-time available looks like a reciepe for an amazingly fun sport!

Sunday, May 10, 2015

Clare Glens Paddle for Nepal & Surf Kayak Training

In light of the recent earthquake that devastated Nepal, Jon Hynes and Brian Keogh have started a fundraising initiative to contribute to the relief effort. The idea is that people organise local paddles and everyone who attends contributes a couple of euro to the collection. Loads of events have been organised around the country, from private trips with just a couple of people to major events open to the general public such as the 'Sunset Kayak for Nepal' on Lough Derg on Friday, organised by Mike Jones of the University of Limerick Activity Centre.

Big Eas, at a decent level with a long exposure. By Will Heffernan of WillHeffernanPhotography

Conveniently, it bucketed rain all day Friday and although that was bad news for anyone hoping for a pretty sunset on Lough Derg, it meant that by the afternoon the Glens was running at a crazy high level. Between them, Andrew Regan and Mark Scanlon came up with the idea of using an evening run on the river as a charity event, and use the evening to raise a few euro towards the Nepal fund. With a surf kayak training event planned for that weekend, and an exam on Monday, I was pretty adamant that I wasn't going to paddle on Friday and was going to get loads of study done instead. Even after Mark rang me and started giving me abuse down the phone I was still sure that I wasn't going to go paddling. But about 10 minutes later I had the car packed and was on the road to the Glens. I never had the best self control in the world...

I got to the Glens to find Bowsie and Bosco geared up and ready to go, with Mark, Simon and Andrew expected to show up from UL shortly after. We ended up having a great evening on the river, with water levels starting at about 150cm and dropping fast over the next couple of hours. We fitted in three quick runs on the river before it got dark, with no drama and lots of stylish lines hit! It was great to get back on a river after a bit of a lull coming up to exams, and having a solid crew who know how things work really cuts down on the amount of faffing involved compared to typical club trips! Afterwards we all chucked a couple of euro into a pot to be added to the fund for Nepal. If anyone would be interested in either contributing to the fund or organising an event get in contact with Brian from totalexperience.ie and I'm sure he'll let you know what the story is!

Happy out after a great evening on the water! By WillHeffernanPhotography.

Procrastinating from studying this year has been pretty varied, including buying a smart phone, learning how to use Snapchat (eoinkeyes, if anyone is interested!), going windsurfing, paddling, surfing, spending way too much time watching videos online and writing totally unnecessary blog posts... Pretty nice of the surf kayakers then to organise a training event for this weekend so that I could be productive while not studying! The plan was to do two solid days on the water and camp on Saturday night in between, with ex-world champ and general paddling legend Len Kelleher around for the weekend to give us advice on how to improve our surfing. Unfortunately the weather didn't really play ball and there wasn't a wave to be found on the Clare coast on Saturday morning. We spent a few hours playing frisbee on a beach before getting bored enough to decide that it would be a good idea to check out Crab island, off the coast of Doolin!

The official Paddlesurf Ireland team training camp. Only the best locations will do!

Now Crab island is a world renowned reef break for a reason, and although it was only breaking around 4ft it was still heavy, shallow and breaking in front of a rock shelf! We brought the whole team out to the island and we caught some sweet waves, with people progressing from just nipping in and out on the shoulder of the wave to moving deeper and deeper and getting longer and longer rides. It was great to see everyone, especially the juniors, pushing themselves and catching more and more critical waves however there was a price to be paid! First it was Bernard Walsh who took off too deep on a wave, leaving him stuck in front of the foam as the wave traveled over the reef, clipping a rock and damaging a fin box on the way through. Next, myself and Aisling Griffin got caught in the wrong position as a set came through. Since you can't duck dive a surf kayak, being caught out of position like that is a really bad situation to be in! I got off easy, taking the wave on the head and getting rag-dolled for a second before the wave let me go and I popped up on the back-side of the wave. Aisling wasn't so lucky and got hit by the full force of the wave, ripping her out of the boat along with the thigh-braces which were meant to be holding her in! By the time she popped up the next wave was coming through, which brought her down for another washing-machine spin cycle. Thankfully that was the end of the set and the lads were able to get in and tow her out of the impact zone. The boat wasn't so lucky and got dragged in and bashed around on the reef for a while before Mike Barry was able to get to it and pull it out. Incredibly, the only damage on the boat afterwards was a bit of lifted seam-tape on the tip of the nose, as well as the damaged thigh-braces from the initial impact. Really impressive for a composite boat, I was sure it was going to be totaled after seeing what was happening to it on the inside! Whatever Ride-Kayaks are building their boats from it's good stuff! 

After Aisling had been reunited with her boat, we decided that the team would probably benefit more from surfing a mellower wave which everyone was confident on. We headed back over to Doolin point, where everyone was able to catch lots of waves and get some great feedback from Len after each one. Len also showed that he hasn't forgotten a thing , throwing helixes in the 9ft long IC boat as if he was back in his Pyranha Jed! We finished off the evening with pier-jumping and pizza and then called it a night. The next morning, as soon as we had taken our tents down it started to rain, which quickly turned into a continuous, unrelenting downpour! After a morning coffee at the Rock Shop in Liscannor, we headed for Lahinch hoping that the strong onshore wind that had blown up during the night hadn't totally wrecked the surf. When we got there the tide was in and there was going to be an hour or two of waiting around before any surfing was done. I had originally planned to get an early surf in before heading home to do some study for Monday's exam, so instead of waiting for surf I decided to call it quits and head back to college. Which explains why I'm here writing this now,,, Although it was a bit messy, there was a decent swell in Lahinch when I left which probably cleaned up a bit after the tide came off the rocks. I'm looking forward to hearing how everyone got on out there. We've got a great team atmosphere going at the moment with everyone encouraging each other, giving advice and helping each other improve their surfing. The effect of this is easy to see too, with everyone's paddling coming on in leaps and bounds between team meet-ups. It's great to see and I'm really looking forward to seeing what level everyone is at when we get to the worlds in less than two months time!