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.
