Tuam freestyle event

As a follow-up to the first freestyle event of the season at Sluice a few weeks ago, Barry Loughnane and Andrew Regan took advantage of the water that had been around for the week to run a combined coaching/competition event at Tuam yesterday. Apparantly water levels there were perfect all week and there was rain forecast which would keep it up for the event.
I've been mad to take the Stealth out there since I got back to Ireland in August and havn't had the opportunity so far, so as soon as I heard 'perfect water levels' all thoughts of taking a plastic boat just in case were out the window. Bad decision! The water that had been promised failed to show up and when we got there the levels were pretty low. Still paddleable, but too low and flushy for loops and definatly not ideal in a carbon boat!

We had a pretty good day anyway, most moves went if you picked the right spot in the hole and the event started off with some great coaching from Barry and Andrew. I think everyones paddling definatly improved during the day, both from the lads tips and as they got used to the feature and by the time the competition started everyone had it pretty much dialled in. The competition was great craic; lots of fun moves, lots of moves that were questionable if they were in the hole or the eddy and people trying to 'improve' the feature by standing on top of the weir!

I know the day was more about the craic than the competition but the results weren't bad either, with Barry beating me into second place and Aran Kilroy coming in third. Full results are up here: Irish Freestyle League Standings. The plan is to have a few of these events over the summer to keep things ticking over. I'll start looking into organising a Gower comp as soon as my college exams are over.

...As soon as I got back to UL I realised that Gower would probably be working, so I went out for a look and ended up spending two hours surfing it at perfect levels! I'm broken now, between Tuam and Gower, I havn't been this sore after paddling for a very long time! Hopefully the ESB will keep releasing like that into the summer, it would be great to have a sort of consistant spot to play on!

That's about it for the moment, exams are nearly here so things will probably quieten down for a while, and then be back to normal around the end of May.

...keep up the good work with the rain dancing, it looks like it's working!