Two Wins in One Weekend!

So last weekend took a while to come together. First Steve Fahey's Biking/Boating GoaterX extravaganza was due to be held in Wicklow along with Wacko on the Jacko. At the same time, there was a surf competition, training day and Irish team meeting scheduled to be held in Clare. When it turned out that there wasn't enough rain to make the Annamoe run, I thought I was going to be able to spend the weekend having the craic in Clare, chilling out in Wayne's beatiful B&B (http://www.bluehorizons.ie/, highly recommended if you're looking for somewhere to spend a weekend away!) and doing a little bit of surf kayaking. And then the Clare Glens race was organised; which meant it was going to be yet another hectic hectic couple of days!

Despite the wind, the surf comp on Saturday was great craic. There was a great turnout, good banter on and off the water, and the waves were pretty decent once you managed to paddle far enough against the wind to get to them! After a long day of competition, I came first in HP with Mick Barry in second, with those results reversed in the long boat. The wind had been picking up all day and by the IC final was almost impossible to paddle against. So the best thing about the finals was that directly afterwards we could go to the pub, get food and a pint and chill out for the evening! Afterwards, we were able to get pretty much the whole World's team together and talk about who is paddling in what and make plans for getting to Spain and back. At the moment it looks like the plan is to drive a van down with everyone's boats and gear, and fly everyone else over. So if anyone knows where we might be able to get good value on ferries, van rental or flights please get in touch!

After spending the night in the B&B with the rest of the surf kayakers, I woke up on Sunday morning, took one look out the window and decided that it was a day that would be better spent on a river instead of in the surf! It looked even windier out than the day before, and although the lads did manage to get out surfing in the afternoon I think I made the right call! I arrived at the Glens just as Barry was getting things started and gathering everyone together for a race briefing. Not bad timing! Water levels were perfect for a race; around .5 in old money, bringing the water up off most of the rocks and cleaning up the run without making anything too difficult. We ended up running the race from the lead in to Big Ass down to the bottom bridge which is a pretty sick race course! In the end I finished first, two seconds ahead of Barry Loughnane in second and Neil Slevin in third, happy out!

Freestyle World Championships...Time to Start Making Plans!!

Finally, after months of false starts due to unpredictable water levels, this weekend we managed to run trials for the Irish team going to the freestyle world championships in Ottawa in August. Barry Loughnane did a great job of putting everything together for the weekend; water levels were just what we asked for, there were tunes on the bank of the river and the weather was the best it's been so far this year! Which makes a nice change from getting hypothermia while waiting for your heat, which is what usually happens when the team trials event happens mid-winter as planned!

 

                       

The juniors relaxing in the eddy before the comp. Congrats to Jack Ledwith, Sean Cahill and Rob Kierans for making the team! Photo by Diarmuid Moloney.

 

When it was announced that the world championships were going to be held on Garburator wave on the Ottawa, interest in making the team sky rocketed compared to previous years! Several people started booking flights home from various corners of the world, and people who havn't been seen at a freestyle competition in years suddenly became interested again! Tom Dunphy and Colin Wong started talking about coming home from Canada and Uganda for the competition, and the Kellehers, Brian Cahill and a few more were also up for it. On top of that, lots of the younger generation, including myself, started booking trips to Uganda in order to get some solid wave training done!

 

Len Kelleher twisting into a Pistol Flip on Gower's left shoulder. Photo by Emer O'Brien.

 

So in the end, the standard of paddling at Gower at the weekend was a step ahead of anything I've seen at a competition in Ireland before. I spent the last week juggling time between finishing my FYP (...yeah, that's finished now, delighted!!) and paddling Gower, so I went into the competition with a pretty solid ride of cleanspins, blunts and backstabs that I was able to hit consistantly. Unfortunatly, I had never tried hitting all of those moves in 45 seconds, and my first two rides went way over time. When I tried speeding things up for the last two rides of the day things started going better and I started fitting a few more moves in. So I finished the first day of competition sitting in 7th place; not altogether unrespectable considering the standard of competition but still not good enough for a place on the team! After Saturday, Moe Kelleher was sitting in first place, followed by Barry Loughnane, Len Kelleher, Tom Dunphy, Billy Brett and Conor Macken.

 

Barry has been consistantly throwing huge airscrews on Gower recently! Photo by Diarmuid Moloney.

 

 

The next day, it was obvious how much everyone wanted a place on that team! Even compared to Saturday's competition everyone stepped it up a level; airscrews were commonplace, entry moves started to be thrown and there was even the occasional McNasty by the likes of Barry and Len! ...entry moves at Gower are something people start attempting when they get tired of trying other moves and I've seen very few of them stuck before the weekend. Seeing them being landed regularly on Sunday was pretty mindblowing! For my first two rides I went with the same sequence of moves that I had been going for the day before, but I could see that with standard of paddling that was going down it was going to leave me right down at the bottom of the leaderboard. Something had to change for my last two rides!

 

Blunts have been going well for me at Gower recently, but it was going to take a whole lot more than that to make the team! Photo by Diarmuid Moloney.

 

My plan all along was to start each ride with the moves that I can hit consistantly, and work my way up the scoresheet towards the more difficult moves that are more likely to result in a flush. This obviously wasn't doing the job so I changed tactic; an 'all or nothing' approach was needed so I started my last two runs with helixes and airscrews before going into the blunts that I had been doing for the rest of my rides. It turns out that I should have gone with this tactic all along; I landed the airscrews and helixes and at the end of the day I finished in joint first with Len Kelleher! Combined with the previous days results this left me sitting in fourth overall, and that gives me a place on the team along with Len Kelleher, Moe Kelleher, Tom Dunphy and Barry Loughnane! Really surprised at this result, especially after Saturday, but I'm delighted with it! I've been aiming to make the senior freestyle team since the day I turned 18!

 

Going for a Pan-Am in one of my earlier rides. These need a bit more work before they're ready for competition! Photo by Diarmuid Moloney.

 

The full results from the weekend have been published here: Team Trials Results. Congratulations to the others who made the team, and commiserations to everyone else. I wasn't expecting to make the freestyle team so I have already committed to going to the surf kayak world championships in July. So now I'm in the great position of having to figure out logistics, gear and cash for two world championships over the summer! ...pity kayaking isn't one of those sports where there's funding available for this kind of stuff! I'm really looking forward to the summer now, and training for both competitions. I'll post progress here for anyone whose interested, and I've a few ideas for fundraising floating around the back of my head so keep an eye out! Better get cracking!

 

All of the girls, happy out after they're weekend on Gower. Congrats to Sinead O'Donnell, Aisling Griffin and Aisling French for making the team! Photo by Emer O'Brien.

 

 

 

Galwayfest 2015!

Last weekend saw the fourth edition of Galwayfest, the annual whitewater, freestyle and party epic hosted by Barry Loughnane, Andrew Regan and the rest of the NUIG crew. This is always an awesome event; water levels are relatively reliable and the locations are suitable for paddlers of virtually any level. Being able to have a big party in the middle of Galway on Saturday also brings a lot to the event! Unfortunately this year Galwayfest clashed with slalom and wildwater events happening in other parts of the country. This meant that numbers were slightly down on previous years but most of the usual faces managed to make it down for the weekend and the weekend was certainly good as ever!

As usual, the event kicked off on Saturday morning with a time trial on the Boluisce river. Relatively benign weather meant that you could hang around and have a bit of craic before the race started without freezing your nuts off, which was a great improvement on varsities a few weeks before! All the usual banter was had about who was going to set the fastest time and everyone was well up for the challenge of beating Barry Loughnane for the first time on his home run! A really cool addition this year was a live timing system, where people at the bottom of the river could see the results coming in as they happened. I was on rescue for the start of the race, and when I paddled down the river to go back for my race run I found out that Barrry was sitting in first place with a solid ten second lead over second. I knew that it was going to take an all-or nothing approach to even come close to Barry's time and although I had a relatively clean race run it wasn't nearly enough. The standard on the day was ridiculusly high; on the Boluisce it really helps to be local and know the river well and it's a long enough race that paddling fitness plays a bigger role than the likes of Ennistymon. In the end my months of sitting in front of a computer working on my final year project did me no favours and 6th place was the best I could manage. Not the result I was hoping for but no matter, there was still plenty of racing to go! In the end no-one could put in a time to match Barry's, we're going to have to wait till next year for another opportunity to knock him off his throne!

This year for the first time the lads added a team race to the event schedule, which was a great call! Teams of four people, you start together and your time stops when the last team member crosses the finish line. My concience isn't exactly clear about being in a team with Aran Kilroy, Neil Slevin and Cian McNally paddling three Pyranha 9Rs and an Exo 6; three of the fastest paddlers in the country paddling the fastest boats we could get our hands on! But the prize that was up for grabs was a crate of beer sponsored by the Independent Brewing company so we had to go all out! We won the team race in the end, and I'm really looking forward to trying out the beer as part of the FYP handup celebrations on Friday week! ...the race-specific boats are starting to show up in force at the whitewater events now, and the number of Pyranha 9Rs, Exo 6s and Jackson Zens in the carpark is starting to get a little worrying! I thought they couldn't be much faster than regular boats, but after paddling the Exo 6 unfortunately that's not the case! It's significantly faster over flat water than the XT, and carries more speed through rapids too, which is going to add up to a significantly better time over a five minute race run. The tradeoff for all that speed is that it is less fun to paddle, it doesn't carve into eddys like the XT, and I found myself having to steer down the race course using sweep strokes instead of using the rails like I would in the XT. It is a lot more forgiving though, the rails don't catch on rocks like more agressive boats do, and it doesn't catch you out if you go through a hole on a slightly wrong edge. All in all, great boat for racing but doesn't really have the feeling that I like for paddling day-to-day.

After the team race it was time for a boaterX between the top six people in the whitewater event. Myself, Barry Loughnane, Aran Kilroy, Shane Little, Cian McNally and Dave Holden headed up to the top of the river for the last time. To try and increase the chances of a bunch of us hitting Poll Gorm at the same time and causing total carnage we paddled most of the way down the river before starting the race. The race started Le Mans style, with us starting on the bank about 10 metres away from our boats, and on Go running to them, hopping in and sprinting down the river. In the end Barry looked like he'd done some shneaky practise and took a flying leap into his boat and was gone before most of us had even realised the race had started! I got onto the water in third, after tripping over a rock on my way to the water that was invisible under all the gorse bushes! The trick to these races is knowing when to put on your spraydeck. If you do it on the bank then you're wasting loads of time, if you do it early in the race there's a risk of people passing you but you don't fill up with water, if you leave it till later in the race you can build a bit of a gap between you and the lads behind but you're constantly filling up with water as you're paddling through rapids with no deck! I played it fairly well, passing someone when they stopped to put their deck on and finishing in second behind Barry. Another advantage of the Six for this kind of thing is that it stays super high going through rapids, I only put my deck on just before the bigger rapids at the end of the race and didn't fill up with too much water before that. Since it's the boaterX results that count towards the overall ranking I was happy enough going into Sunday's freestyle comp.

After a brilliant, slightly hazy night out in Galway we travelled out to Tuam the next morning to find prime levels, not too much wind and sunshine in between the hail showers...about the best conditions you can get for a Tuam comp! With tunes provided and a chilled out, jam style format a great day was had on the water. A few of the UL crew who came along had done very little hole paddling and made great progress during the competition, and I think a lot of other people there were the same. The jam style format really gives everyone a chance to go out and experiment and push themselves, much better craic than the ICF 45 second ride format! In the expert division Barry was untouchable, with all the time being put in on the water very obviously paying off for him! My freestyle abilities are also obviously developing in proportion with the time I'm spending on the water and I finished well down the field. Still, it was good enough for joint fourth place overall with Shane Little, with Aran Kilroy in second overall and Andrew Regan in third. Barry was again in a league of his own with convincing wins in both whitewater and freestyle. Huge thanks to Barry, Andrew and everyone else who helped out with the event, and to Aran Kilroy for the sofa space on Saturday! It was another awesome event, and I'm looking forward to doing it all over again this time next year! Next up on the calender is trials for the freestyle team going to the world championships in Canada next summer. That's an event that I'd love to be able to go to but competition for places is going to be fierce. We'll give the trials a go anyway and see how it goes, some of the moves learned in Uganda over the summer might still be there, buried in muscle memory somewhere!