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.

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.

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!

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!

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!