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!

Intervarsites 2015...Awesome Weekend in Galway!!

So it's been a few weeks since the event, but I owed my FYP a bit of time in leu after not really being able to concentrate on anything college related for the week coming up to varsities! Most people reading this probably know the story, but anyway, from the ground up; the intervarsities is the annual event where the fifteen or so college kayak clubs in the country come together for a weekend of partying, having the craic and competing to see who brings home the coveted big silver trophy! ULKC went into this years competition having won the last five years in a row, which makes it sound like we're in a league of our own in terms of college clubs when really there is a whole lot more to it than that! Each year we have won the competition by a hair's breadth; it always comes down to a couple of points in the end, and thankfully for the last few years we have just done enough to scrape the title. A few years ago the competition even came down to the nominal points which were going for fancy dress at the time! There has always been several colleges just behind us in the final ranking and this year was no different, coming up to the big weekend it was wide open!

This year's competition was hosted by NUIG/GMITG and they started the planning process with big ideas about how they were going to make the competition more inclusive, increase participation by novice paddlers and make the whole thing more fun and more spectator friendly. These ideas were awesome, including holding the freestyle finals at night in the middle of a massive party and adding a whole new mass participation discipline in the form of a boater-cross. It's a great ethos for the event, and some great ideas, and I really hope the whole vibe carries over to next year's event!

Unfortunatly, the downside to adding an extra event was that the whole thing kicked off at stupid o'clock on Friday morning at the bank of the Boluisce! When we got there it was freezing cold, still dark, the water still hadn't turned on and the whole thing seemed like a bit of a shite idea! Quickly though, the sun came up, the water arrived, we woke up and it all seemed a bit more bearable. Even though it was still feckin freezing! As soon as it was possible to see everyone around us the craic started, it was great to see everyone again and of course the usual abuse started flying around over who was going take the course record, and win the event overall! We had a pretty strong team for the whitewater event; myself, Andrew Regan, who needs no introduction, Emer Farrell, who's been paddling even longer than I have and Mark Scanlon, who just back from a year of studying/paddling in Austria and trip to Mexico so we were going to give it our all and try and take first in the whitewater event. Myself and Mark also went for a low water spin on the Boluisce the weekend before varsities to refresh our memories of all the lines for the race! As extra motivation, myself and Aran Kilroy, the event organiser, were competing for bragging rights coming up to Galwayfest which is great motivation to paddle that bit harder! Unfortunatly in the end we were knocked out of the top spot by a super-quick Trinity team, who's slalom backround could be recognised from a mile away by their superior technique coming across the finish line. And Aran Kilroy came in two seconds faster than me, which is rather disappointing! However I did take third place which isn't bad, and we came second in the team rankings which left us in a great place going into the other events!

 

Lifting the XT through the fish counter towards the end of the whitewater race. Photo by Oisin McHugh.

 

After the whitewater event finished up, it was straight back to the Claddagh basin for the polo competition. Polo has recently been our weakest event, and a few years ago we would have been among the weakest college teams in the country. For the last three years however we have been putting quite a bit of effort in and have been working throughout each year to try and improve the team. Slow progress can be seen; in the last few years we have gone from loosing the majority of Div 2 games in the Munster polo league, to winning most Div 2 games, to loosing the majority of Div 1 games...promising stuff! Compared to some of the other colleges, we have no experienced polo players, so to try and make up for that we were training once a week in the pool since September, focusing on getting skills and tactics down before varsities. Since Christmas, we really upped the intensity and started training three nights a week focusing on speed, ball control and teamwork. All the hard work seems to have paid off, in our very first game we won a tight, very scrappy game against DCU, who previously would have been one of the best teams in the competition. Although we won the game, we weren't happy with how messy it was and used the next two games, which we won well, to try and work on teamwork and communication and start playing the way we knew we could play. Due to the limited daylight available, the format was changed so that only the top team in each group went through to the next round and we were drawn against an extremely strong team from UCD. Although we started playing better than in the group stages it wasn't enough, they were a slightly better team, we went out and they went on to win the competition. Unfortunately we never got to replay last years drawn game against DIT! They went down to UCD in the final and we beat NUIG in the 3rd/4th place playoff. That's our best result in polo since I started college and another good one for the overall competition so we're pretty happy with it!

Everyone getting behind the team despite the cold and wind! Photo by Oisin McHugh.

After a big night out on Friday night, it was up early again on Saturday morning for the long distance race. Fuzzy heads lead to everyone being predictably slow to get registered, round up all their gear and get changed but eventually several hundred people were on the water and raring to go! After  a couple of false starts, the actual starting whistle went and everyone was on the move! Recently, a whole pile of our first and second years have somehow started going out on the Shannon behind the college, paddling around in the cold and dark for a few hours a few times every week and somehow find it fun! I don't really understand it but it means that their paddling technique is great and it really helps them progress quickly when they do get out on whitewater. It also puts them in a great position going into an intervarsities long distance race! No outstanding results, they've only been paddling a few months so that will have to wait till next year, but lots of very respectable ones, which is what it takes to do well overall in Long Distance. As well as the sheer committment from the first years, Gavin Sheehan and Eoin Farrell put in a huge effort to take second place in the topo duo class, and Mark Scanlon paddled a great race, picking off the field one by one to finish in second behind me in the GP class. All in all, not an unproductive day of slogging along on flatwater! ...I realised very quickly at the start of the race that whenever I crossed someone elses wakes water started pouring in through open deck-line holes that I had forgotten to duct-tape before the race. If that happened too much I would be down and out, literally, so I had no choice only to go out in front, stay in the clean water and hope that no one would overtake me at the end. In the end it worked out better than I could have hoped, with myself and Mark losing everyone else on the final upstream battle at the end of the race. So that was another discipline down, and another good one for ULKC.

While the tunes were there, you couldn't not have an Inter-club dance-off on top of the Great-Outdoors van at the freestyle event! Photo by Oisin McHugh

 

After the long distance race, everyone moved back to the Claddagh basin for the freestyle competition. Unfortunatly due to the water levels not playing ball the party/freestyle event at Tuam had to be called off and the freestyle event was changed to a flatwater format where everyone got two one-minute rides and your best six moves counted. It was a really cool format which allowed you take a couple of attempts at your biggest moves instead of having to keep racking up the points with easier, less spectacular moves. That format is great for spectators and more fun to compete in too. We had another solid team for this one with myself, Andrew Regan, Eoin Farrell and Caoimhe Farrell and we were hoping for another good result, particularly since we always spend a lot of time messing around in the pool in freestyle boats. Andrew Regan, thanks to him switching from NUIG to UL, was the target of endless systemised abuse in the form of the weekend banter league and one of the challenges promised points for the college who could throw the biggest piece of fruit at Andrew during his freestyle run! ...that was great to watch, and it was even better to see him throw down a really solid freestyle run at the same time! Although I would love to have footage of the competition to compare to the score sheets, DCU put down impressive runs across the board and took a well deserved second place. DIT also had some solid runs and took first place, I wouldn't have called it that way but that's what happens in freestyle. Either way, congratulations to both of them, and we went away with third place which is not something to complain about at all!

 

Prize-winning watermelon en-route towards Andrew's head! Photo by Diarmuid Moloney.

 

After a great Mexican-themed party in the Vic on Saturday night, we woke up to find Galway covered in a pea-soup fog the next morning. This wasn't ideal for the second mass-participation event of the weekend, a boater-cross on the lower Corrib, ending pretty much in the sea. There were fears that a swimmer might be missed in the fog and float out to sea, an unlikely scenario considering the number of people on rescue but still not a chance you want to take. In the end, the organisers waited until the fog cleared a bit and then made the call to go for it, with numbers reduced to people with a solid roll. This greatly disappointed our first years who were mad to be let loose and cause some chaos so hopefully this event will be a thing again next year so that they can have their turn. In the end it gave our intermediate paddlers a chance to shine; they're the people who didn't paddle before college but started in first year and have been super-committed since then, and considering the amount of time that they have been paddling are generally pheomenally good paddlers. They're the ones who organise most of the club trips, train the beginners and generally make the club what it is, but don't generally get to paddle in whitewater and freestyle at varsities just because competition for those places is so tight.  It was great to see them have an event where they could compete against people on the same level as themselves, and they did a great job of it. In the end we had five paddlers who made it through to the second round of the boater cross which is a great result!

 

 

A bit of fog wasn't enough to calm down the boater-cross competition! Photo by Oisin McHugh.

 

Once we had packed up after the boater cross it was time to head back to the NUIG campus for the results presentation. After the weekend of competitions, no-one knew the freestyle or boater cross results and the competition was wide open like usual; I think everyone was a little tense! In the preamble to the big announcement, I had the honour of passing on the Colm Johnson trophy to Aran Kilroy; an awesome guy who put a huge amount of work into making the varsities what it was and really pushed the fun, inclusive aspect of the whole event. There's no-one I would have preferred to hand it over to, and I'm looking forward to paddling with him, and competing against him, for a long time into the future! Laura Griffin was given the women's equivelant, another great call by the captains of all the different clubs. It was announced that next years event will be hosted by GMIT Castlebar. All the best to them, I'm sure they'll do an awesome job of it! As the results were being called out the tension was racheted a little higher when freestyle was announced, since it wasn't quite what we were expecting. We also didn't have as many top finishes in long distance as some of the other clubs so right up to the final moment it was still anyone's game. In the end, when we were called out in first place, I was surprised and delighted that all the hard work had paid off. Although some people were less than thrilled to hear that we had done it again, it really is down to lots of hard work by several generations of ULKC paddlers that we are where we are today and it's something that I'm really proud to be a part of. Hopefully the whole vibe in the club of great craic combined with putting lots of effort into improving people's paddling is something that can be maintained long into the future!

 

Passing on the Colm Johnson memorial award to NUIG's Aran Kilroy. I guess we both quite like those Kayak the Nile t-shirts! Photo by Oisin McHugh.

 

Lots of happy faces around after taking home the title! Photo by Diarmuid Moloney.

 

 

North Wales in January...No Water? No Problem!

So we arrived back on Saturday from another epic trip to Wales! Yes it is January, yes it was cold, no there wasn't very much water and yes, despite all the above it was still great craic! We made the most of the water that was there with some great days on the Dee and the Tryweren, took a day on an easier river to chill out and enjoy the scenery and towards the end of the week when lots of tired bodies were feeling the effects of paddling for several days a row we went hiking on Mount Snowdon! With darkness coming unfortunatly early in North Wales in winter there was also plenty of time left over for a bit of banter in Jesse James' awesome little bunkhouse in the evenings!

Lots of people learned a whole lot over there, which is the focus of a more detailed write up I'm doing. It may or may not be appearing here...if you're interested in finding out more then I would keep a close eye on Irish kayaking publications in the near future! In the meantime, here's a video Diarmuid Moloney put together of the trip: ULKC Wales trip 2015 on THE Dee.

 

Post snowball fight peace! Photo by Diarmuid Moloney.

Solid Start to the Season!

In keeping with the age old tradition of Irish Kayakers, last Saturday myself and a few of the lads from UL headed to Glenbeigh for New Years. Although the news that the Ross Inn wouldn't be opening caused a bit of uncertainty about how the week would go, it didn't seem to have put anyone off from going down and down there we met up with groups from UCD, NUIG, UCC and Napier University in Scotland, a mixture of old friends and new faces. Although water levels were low when we got there and dropping, it was great to see everyone from the other clubs again and we still managed to get out paddling, starting with the ever reliable Upper Carragh and moving out to the Comeragh the next day, which is a tight, technical, rocky, bog-fed ditch which was great in a group of four but would be totally impractical for a larger group.

Over the next few days more representatives from UL showed up, the other college's houses became packed to the gills, the parties started to get bigger and it started raining. It was all great craic and we were able to vary the paddling a bit, including the Gearhamean at decent levels with a big group from NUIG which was awesome craic and the Lower Carragh, which kept our beginners busy and on the water. On the lower Carragh we were able to spend a long time working on paddling technique and rescue skills, which will hopefully help the first years a lot when they head to Wales in a few weeks time! Unfortunatly, with the Ross Inn closed there was nowhere for everyone to congregate in the evenings. Although an ordinary country pub with locals in it is never going to match the Ross for a kayaking party we made the best of it and the evenings were still great craic! 

Due to water levels the Flesk race which had been scheduled for the 27th of December was moved to the 3rd of January, the last day of Kerry for the majority of people down. After a week of paddling, partying and driving around looking for water it was a tired group of paddlers that showed up at the Flesk on Saturday morning. The water levels did help to wake everyone up, we arrived to find it massively high for the second year running! Again, the race had to be confined to the first two hundred meters of the river since we didn't have enough people to set up rescue at all the locations it would be needed at that level. This is an awesome race course, with approximately one hundred metres of fast-flowing flatwater into a hundred metres of rapids with a choice of lines and a couple of tricky moves to make. Race times of about a minute meant that there was no chance to make up time after a minor mistake, every part of the course was crucial. In the end, third place was taken by David Higgins with joint first going to myself and Andrew Regan! 

Before Christmas, when the Glens race had to be called off due to low water levels, the whole circus was moved to the Ennistymon Falls for the day. Great water levels and a huge turn out made for a deadly day on the water, helped by decent weather and sunshine which are pretty unusual at whitewater events in Ireland! The day started off with a time-trial event, followed by a boaterX competition followed by a mass start spin down the river. The mass start event was pretty impressive, with 40 or so paddling down the falls together! Unfortunatly I went out in the semi-final of the boaterX, but the time trial more than made up for it since I came first overall! Combined with the results from the Flesk and Buncrana it's been a dream start to the season, hopefully I'll be able to keep it up for the rest of the series! Jackson are putting up a prize boat for the league again this year, which I'm inelegible for due to my association with Wavesport back in the day and a few of the other lads can't get it either. Since only four races are being counted for points this year the series is still wide open, if you havn't been coming to the events so far you really should start making time for them, they're a great way to meet new people, paddle new rivers and you never know, you could get a new boat out of it! 

BoaterX heat at Ennistymon, photo by Barry Loughnane.

In other news, I got out on the Glens a few times after exams finished, and took a bit of a hit on Constriction on one run. The video is pretty funny, check it out!