A ramble on rolling!

Rolling with joy, summer 2010, photo by Joan Byron

WARNING! EXPLOSION OF KAYAK GEEKERY!

Posted this yesterday on Facebook - figured I'd share here too as it ended up being more of an essay than planned, plus I can add some links here. I'd meant to talk about having a good time at a pool session and somehow that morphed into telling my entire personal history of rolling!
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So, back in one of those crazy times at work but quite buoyed by thinking back on the rolling session to which I treated myself on Sunday. Been weirdly on the fence about writing about it but an old friend called me "the ballerina of kayakers" on FB today, which was SO sweet and also EXACTLY what I'm trying to work my way back to these days (see above photo from 2010, which just captures how rolling feels to me when I'm rolling well - I LOVE this shot!)

I didn't roll for a while after my mastectomy for kind of obvious reasons. 1st roll after that went fine. 2nd one too, 5th one, 10th one, 20th one...mostly all fine, although sometimes the hip snap could've been snappier, but somehow the glee with which I used to fling myself over back when Violet was living in the area and paddled with me just hasn't come back, and that does so much towards relaxing you and letting you really play in your boat.

I don't know if this is true for all paddlers, but for me, an awful lot of the rolling game resides in my head. I didn't learn to roll all that fast; an early success (I didn't know how I'd done it, but hey, I was right-side up and the instructor swore he hadn't brought me up, so yay) in my first rolling class was followed by something uncomfortably close to a dislocated shoulder on my 1st attempt outside of a class. Took a while to work through the chickenosity that left behind (that thing about getting right back on the horse they made me do when I was a kid taking riding lessons? Unfortunately not so easy when dealing with rolling and a shoulder injury); eventually (in particular thanks to some careful instruction by Richard Chen-See at Manhattan Kayak, who did so much towards laying my early kayaking foundation) I ended up with a pretty solid roll. I still never really, truly, 100% believed it was going to work, though.

What finally busted through that mental block was getting into a string of winter rolling sessions back when the Yonkers Paddling and Rowing Club was running those at the Yonkers YMCA. They were on work nights and you would sign up for a set of them. Jack Gilman and Andy Laiosa were the main instructors there. Jack introduced me to Greenland rolling; those of us with rolls would practice in the deep end while beginners were working with instructors in the shallow end Yonkers had a great little fleet of old-school whitewater boats for the small YMCA pool; they were super easy to roll and with a string of sessions to play, you could just have more and more fun figuring out how many oddball ways you could get these boats rightside up. There was one memorable series in particular where we just started rolling with anything that wasn't nailed down - pool buoy? Check! Kickboard? Check! Hey, how about that lifesaving dummy? Yeah! Jack even brought in a hockey stick and a toy hockey stick one time and we rolled with those, too (hockey stick is fine but has to be facing the right way or the curve of the blade makes it dive - good to keep in mind next time you capsize in Canada and the only thing you can get your hands on is a hockey stick).

So that was the winter when the whole rolling thing got to be Just Plain Fun. I don't remember where that fits in with my first combat roll, which was with Atlantic Kayak Tours at a BCU 4-star training & assessment in Rhode Island, but I do know that that was when I just started rolling for kicks on almost every paddle - which I hadn't been doing before.

Fast forward to 2016, though - after the surgery, I did start rolling again, but there's just been this timidity about it. Again, as I said, not that I was failing - just that I didn't trust myself after a long break from practicing, with some very weird re-rigging of my pectoral muscles added. So, like, every time I went out, I would find some excuse not to roll. Too cold. Too windy. I have a cold. To many beginners on the trip. Don't want to make this paddle about me showing off. Yeah. BLAH BLAH BLAH. Needed more rolling, less excuses.

One great moment last year, though, was my first combat roll since the operation. That was on the makeup day that Dov Neimand ran for those of us who'd taken the IDW he'd run with Dale Williams in June of last year - with lightning storms in the area, we'd gotten weathered out for our rough water day, and although Dale and Dov had still given us what I would've said was a thoroughly good day of alternative dry land and indoor instruction, Dov still offered us a surf day. That happened in October, and although it wasn't the best conditions, we did get a good workout out at Breezy Point We finished off playing in some weird waves running over the sandbar at right angles to each other - there was one point when I went to brace only there wasn't anything to brace on by the time my blade hit the water, and boop, over I went. And it was shallow, and I could see the sand, and I said "Nope, not coming out of this boat" and I set up and came up with just as comfy a roll as I could want. And there were witnesses as I whooped and hollered like a crazy person. I was SO HAPPY!

So that was fantastic - combat roll does so much to re-instill confidence. So I was all excited to keep going with it at the pool this winter - but then the pool Sebago's had access to in past years has needed a lot of repairs lately & so we were left high and dry this year. Boo.

But Dov Neimand and Julie McCoy have been running sessions at the New York Sports Club up in Dobbs Ferry, though. They started with weeknights, which were a little tricky with work, but they did get some Sunday afternoon time slots last weekend and this weekend. Bit of a hike from Brooklyn but I do looove that train ride up the Hudson. And it really was just what I needed - an hour and a half to just roll and roll and roll and roll and roll some more, with both Greenland and euro and eventually even trying some hand rolling (which is a skill I had once but have lost - didn't get it back but the fact that I was comfortable enough to give it a try and trust in a greenland paddle tucked under the decklines as a backup felt good).dana, sans-serif;"> Dov brought an NDK Latitude for me to try - it's for the "tall thin paddler" so, uh, not quite me these days (tall, yes), but with a little wiggling I was able to squeeze in, and it rolled great. I did not work my way too far up the Greenland list as the space was small and there were active swimmers next to us, and I decided to stick with rolls that I could control well - but just doing the basics again and again and again felt great. And at the end I switched out that slick NDK for a Chatham 17, just to see what I could do with a boat that isn't quite such a "cheater" - well, offside didn't feel perfect but I was able to right the boat on both sides, and then at the end Julie came over to horse around with me a little bit & somewhere in there I fell over completely un-set-up and still didn't even think about ditching, just reset and rolled. Good finished - finished up with just that same spirit of play that that long ago Yonkers session had. So good to feel that again. So that was all fantastic and the ride home along the Hudson with the sun going down was just so much gravy.

I'll take that over a spa day any day.

Sebago Frostbite Regatta 2015 Edition!

With a forecast that was clearly and emphatically calling for winds gusting up to 30 mph, TQ and I were half expecting the paddle section of the annual Sebago New Year's Day Frostbite Regatta to be cancelled, but the morning of the 1st dawned with no updates later than the "Come on out, it's gonna be great!" one that went out a day or two in advance. If there'd been rain or snow in addition, I'm pretty sure it would've been off, but it takes some truly foul weather to stop this event (I think the paddle has been called off once since I joined the club in 2006, we'll paddle in snow, we've crunched through the ice, pretty much takes an actual blizzard to shut us down) and aside from the high winds and slightly nippy temperatures it was an absolutely lovely day, so off we went. And two of us saw seals! The winds were just as forecasted though, so just south of the entrance to Mill Basin, half of us cut our paddle short while the other half decided to go look for more seals.

You might be tempted to say that those who went for the distance were the hardcore set, and I do have to admit that this was probably the shortest paddle I have ever gotten winter-geared up for - but those of us who headed back earlier WERE the ones who stopped outside the basin for the traditional New Year's Day rolls, so maybe we can just say it was 2 different kinds of hardcore. At any rate, it was a nice morning out on the water, followed, as usual, by great food and catching-up back at the clubhouse. Happy 2015!

Gusty winds and clumsy neoprene gloves did make taking pictures a little tricky but I did get some nice shots (sorry, no seals, they were peeking, not posing) and have put together a gallery. Click here to view. Happy 2015! 

Scallop fishing, Sebago style!

Marc goes foraging in the Sand Hole in Oyster Bay! Click on first pic for nice slideshow view of his big catch. 

Back-Deck Rolling Sequence

Still pretty busy at work, but I thought I would just take a quick break to share this 2-minute snippet of a rolling demo that Sebago clubmate Milton did during Saturday's lunch break at the Hudson River Greenland Festival. Alison Sigethy explains as Milton runs through a series of layback rolls, beginning with the basic Greenland sweep roll ("Kinnguffik paarlallugu/nerfallaallugu - "coming up on the other side, on one's back") and progressing to an attempt at the "elbow roll" (Ikusaannarmik niaqoq/pukusuk patillugu — "only with the elbow, touching the head/ neck"). 

These are just a few of the 35 capsize manuevers that the most skilled Greenland kayakers can perform. For the full set, many including video clips and all with sound clips of Greenland great Maligiaq Padilla pronouncing the Greenlandic names, click here to visit QajaqUSA.org. - that's where I got the 2 translations above. Enjoy! 

Last Sebago Pool Session of the 2012-13 chlorine season!

Note - lots of fun pictures down below the verbiage!

By Sunday morning, TQ and I were back to our more habitual fun of kayaking! It would've been a bit on the gusty side outside, but guess what, it's always perfect in the pool, and with Sunday being the last session of the 2012-2013 pool season, we didn't want to miss it. That actually had a lot to do with the weird Friday baseball whim, with a good "yoga in a boat" session planned for Sunday I didn't feel like I really had to get out on the water on Saturday.

I'm very glad we made a few more pool sessions this year. We spent plenty of time in the pool during the winter of 2011-2012, but we were actually teaching basics, and between that and the winter being a very mild one, it was a little hard to talk ourselves into Sunday mornings at the pool, too. I'd also done something peculiar to my shoulder during the 2012 New Year's Day frostbite regatta - again, because it was so warm I did about 30 New Year's Day rolls instead of the usual half-dozen or so, which was just stupid - the first 29 were fine but I was getting a little lightheaded by the end (which is generally a good sign that you should stop) and the 30th went wrong, somehow I blew an offside roll, got flustered, went for the on-side without a proper setup and although I came up in one piece I pulled something in the shoulder area in the process. It wasn't bad enough to send me to a doctor but even after the actual soreness went away it didn't feel quite right for a long time. It left feeling a little timid about doing anything much more adventurous than basic sweep rolls (a very simple roll and the one that I actually do when I get knocked over in surf) over the summer. I'm not sure anyone I paddled with during the summer would have noticed that I was being more restrained than usual but I was, and I knew it. I did finally try a hand roll at Orient Point in August - I failed the roll but the shoulder didn't complain at all, which was nice. 

TQ and I had agreed that we didn't want to let another winter go by without some good practice, and the club's getting invited to go do a rolling demo at the Southern Connecticut Small Craft Symposium back in February was of course a BIG motivator in actually following through with that. Sure enough, a few sessions in warm clear water restored the fun factor nicely. I'm still missing a lot of the Greenland rolls I used to be able to do but the basics are re-solidified and guess what, my hand roll came back. Phew.

And of course I couldn't resist taking some pictures as clubmates got in their last hurrahs. A good end to pool season. Now all I have to do is remember to keep practicing once the water warms up in the bay, especially if I can't make it to the Hudson River Greenland Festival, which I suddenly decided on Sunday that I wanted to do but which may already by booked solid - gotta move fast for that one!

Chee! And Huli Huli, and Huli Huli Huli!

1. CHEE! This blog spent 24 hours as Bonnie's Bubbly Broadway Blog and I didn't get one bit of flack about it! I don't get it! Of course, that in honor of an absolutely fabulous evening at the theater & maybe that was just so obvious nobody thought it was worth saying anything about. Anyways. Back to normal now. Food and boats, boats and food, la la la!

2. Look, Joe from the Horse's Mouth sent some HULI HULI CHICKEN!


3. "Huli" also applies to boats. Huli, huli, huli!

However, there's still occasional sun here.

Post-storm sunset at the Hudson River Greenland Festival 2009, Croton Point, NY.


I don't know what they're sacrificing, but the Yonkers Paddling & Rowing Club & other assorted organizers have certainly had the cooperation of the weather gods for this event, at least the times I've attended -

let's have a comparison sunset from 2008:



And I've just gone through & done some captions for all the 2009 pictures I posted to a Flickr set on Sunday night. Check out the set here! It was really a fantastic weekend.

How Rolling is Confusing

Ha ha. Here's an example that anyone can understand, using a single picture.

You know this one from yesterday?


Well, maybe that was kind of upside down.

When I took it, if I looked up, there was the floor.

If I looked down, there was the surface.

So...maybe this is right side up?

Hmmm.

Confusing?

Great! You got the point!

Hudson River Greenland Festival - Registration Open!

photo by Jack Gilman

Hudson River Greenland Festival
June 27-29th
Croton Point Park, Croton, NY

Registration is now open!

Come spend the weekend on the Hudson River at Croton Point Park, learning and refining traditional kayaking techniques. Instruction will be led by Cheri Perry and Turner Wilson of Kayakways. This is a small intimate group so registration is limited and fills up fast.

Do not delay and miss out on the opportunity to be part of the experience.

Sign up now: registration will be closed May 4th. Choice of cabins/tent sites are available on a first-come, first-served basis with your registration.

Go to yprc.org for more complete information on the weekend as well as the registration form.

For more info, please contact Jack Gilman at hudsonsb@yahoo.com

* Check out the Yonkers Paddling & Rowing Club online athttp://www.yprc.org
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See you on the river!

More of Jack G.'s photos from last year's fun. I didn't make it last year because that was the weekend of the Sebago sailing clinic, but I'm happy to say I'll be joining in this year as part of Cheri & Turner's mentoring team. Can't wait!

Cheri Perry


Group shot


Turner Wilson


Mentor Maggie

2nd to Last Greenwich Pool Session (with Bonus Crocus)

Spring is not yet quite sprung...but we're getting there! Check out the volunteer crocus Adele the Gardening Chair found hanging out in the middle of the grounds. None of us planted this!

Greenwich pool sessions are winding down - next week's the last one. Now some of us, in a collective moment of temporary insanity, have volunteered to help out with the rolling demo at the Long Island Paddlesports Symposium. What's so insane about that? Well, nothing much except that this year's venue doesn't have a pool. Please please please please please no cold snaps this week...

Anyways - Last week's session was incredibly crowded - this week's was the polar opposite! Just a few quick shots from today's -

(echo effect)
HELLOOOO!ello! ello! ello!
Where is everybody!uddy! uddy! uddy!

Pete averaged it out - said the average number of people in the pool at any given time was 5. Made for a pretty intensive session, both because there were fewer people to schmooze with and/or apologize to when you ran them over and because it's just easier to practice with more room. A lot of the regulars were missed but this did make for perfect conditions to spread out & work hard.


John had a fun new toy...introducing Helmet-Cam! Equally usable as Bow-Cam and In-Hand-Cam. We may see some footage from that one of these days. I proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I am never going to be the US's answer to Justine C - there was something about having a camera parked on my bow pointed at me & recording that kind of spooked me - I was blowing some pretty simple rolls! Yes, I'm a touch camera-shy.

He finally had pity & took the camera away but my gosh has he got some blackmail material.

Redeemed myself through the rest of the session - storm rolls were working mostly, hand rolls both sides, a good dizzying series of "conveyer belt rolls" and lots of swimming to paddles & other breath-holding silliness.

And oh, yes, I did roll Jean T's Feathercraft. As some may recall, last week I'd tried to roll this & failed completely. I mean I couldn't get the thing to give so much as a twitch in the right directions - the sponsons (inflatable tubes that run the length of Feathercraft gunwales & provide stability & tension for the skin) Just Said No. This week, Jean let me give it another shot, this time with sponsons deflated. Much Much Better!

Finished off the session with a little pure horsing around. Next lap I was up on my knees doing a Rolls-Royce hood ornament impression. Wasn't going to try standing up - I am no airy sylph & I was concerned about bending the aluminum rods that form the frame, but for those for whom the simple business of standing up in their own boat has lost all novelty & is becoming humdrum - perhaps trying that (with a tolerant friend with a hardshell) would provide some new amusement!


Been a fun season in Greenwich. A warm (if soggy) thank-you to theAppalachian Mountain Club's CT Flatwater Committee (especially Jean T!) for hosting these!

Oysters for J-Bay, and The Boat I Didn't Roll!

Thank you Jack (of New York By Jack) for sending a good Times article about efforts that are underway to seed oysters to help clean up Jamaica Bay. Very cool. I hope that people are not daft enough to steal them to sell them - aside from the fact that I wouldn't want to eat a Jamaica Bay filter feeder, the critters have got a very important job to do.

That's probably all I'll have time for today - going to another meeting tonight, this one's a fun one, more on that later - but the oyster article is too neat to not share.

ps ok, can't resist mentioning one thing that will make the kayakers laugh & confuse everybody else - this Sunday, in my continuing quest (well, it's not a real quest, just a theme that seems to be emerging this winter) to roll as many different kinds of boats in one winter as possible, I finally asked the owner of a Feathercraft K-1 if I could try rolling her boat.

It actually cracked me up how totally, completely and profoundly I failed. The thing hardly budged. I didn't think it would be easy but I was sort of amazed at how solidly the boat said "No".

Pool Sessions - Part 1. Working through the psych-out factor, or It's All In My Head!

8:55 A.M. on a Sunday at the Greenwich YWCA. 5 minutes 'til fun!


Wow, what a couple of weeks at work! It just seems like the stuff I have to do just keeps piling up in a way that I can barely keep ahead of it. That, by the way, is why a lot of my posts lately have been so uncharacteristically short - just haven't had time to really write.

But I have not been all work & no play at all!

For starters, I have made it to a couple of pool sesssions recently, as I always enjoy doing this time of year. I missed the first one of the series run by the CT branch of the Appalachian Mountain Club because it was too pretty outside, but I did make the second one and had a little bit of a breakthrough. Sorta silly one but still, breakthroughs are breakthroughs.

I always find it funny how much of a mental game rolling can be. I can psych myself out of doing a roll I'm capable of doing so easily. Or, I can set things up so everything's optimal & then I'll have a much better shot. Remember my New Year's Day handroll? Did you notice how I started out by almost ceremonially placing a Greenland paddle under the deck bungees? Well, the fact is I had not done a handroll that far into the wintertime before & I was setting myself up with the magic feather effect. My on-side handrolls are pretty solid, but for some reason I just never believe it's going to work. If there's a GP there on deck, I have my backup, I can relax & everything goes fine. If not, sometimes I just spaz out the tiniest bit, and then there I am banging on my hull hoping somebody will spare me the bother of swimming.

So there's one mental block that I give into more than I should. On New Year's Day, I was paddling with a Euro, and I actually borrowed somebody's GP. I wanted it there & hey, the handroll worked as usual, yay!

Another silly mental block I've had for ages has been the one that says "Bonnie can't do an offside handroll in any sea kayak other than a snugfitting Greenland boat". I don't even try that much. Rationally I know I could if I'd just work on it - in fact I did one last year in the pool, so I know it's possibly, but the self-psych-out factor is just there.

Part of this is that I'm frequently in strange boats at these pool sessions. Usually the way Sunday pool sessions work for me are that I go up & hang w/TQ on Saturday, then we go to the pool session Sunday morning, I borrow one of his boats & he brings his. Generally he has to leave early to go to work & takes his boats when he goes, but I stay & catch a ride back down to Brooklyn with one of the Sebago set. Usually there are enough boats there that I can borrow for the rest of the session.

Two weeks ago, though, I was completely swamped at work (are we seeing a theme here? ugh, yes) & failed to get in touch with TQ (who I thought was also swamped for some reason I now can't remember at all - just one of those things where my brain was scrambled from a string of 10+ hour days I guess) to make the usual arrangements, so I was coming up from Brooklyn. I called Stevie to see who was leaving for the pool at what time on Sunday morning; I wasn't entirely expecting to bring my boat as the cars usually carry more paddlers than boats, but I reached him just when he was heading to the club for the Saturday roof-rack loading & as it happened, there was space & he offered to bring mine.

Woohoo!

So there I was in a nice warm swimming pool, with nose clips and goggles, and practicing in my very own boat for the first time EVER in the entire history of pool sessions I've attended. Gosh, it was nice. It's so strange, another one of these mental things is that I have got a thing about being in my own boat - there's just a level of comfort and security I get from being in my own boat that I don't even get from other Romanys.

Silly, innit?

Anyways. So as I was saying - there I was, in a pool, with goggles & a nose clips & 2.5 hours to practice in my own boat. Started with back-deck finish stuff, moved on to the forward-finishing stuff I'm less good at - that was all working pretty well. I didn't do anything spectacular, but it was just a good, solid, satisfying practice session.

I like to finish up with a few handrolls. Onside, onside, onside, whee, onside, another onside.

Then I thought, "Hmmm. Offside."

I had no excuses not to try. It was the absolutely positively perfect combination of factors. In a pool. With noseclips. All warmed up. GP on deck ready at hand. Everything working fine. AND for the cherry on the sundae of perfect get-over-it conditions, sitting in my own trusty Romany.

Nope, no excuses. Tuck right, over and...

wow. That was easy.

So I went ahead & did a whole bunch more! Sweet!

They had to kick me out of the pool that day.

Last weekend, we were back to normal, me boat-hopping through the session. At the end of the session, I decided that I should see if the offside would work in somebody else's Romany. Baby steps, you know, but still another step past this blockhead mental block.

Worked just fine. Wouldn't quite say that I've nailed the offside handroll yet, but in a Romany at least, there's been marked improvement in the psyching-myself-out factor, and that feels good.

Well, that's all for now. Last weekend's session was fun, too, but person does not live by kayak alone - there's the occasional Irish tune to play, too!

No Time To Write - here's some moving pictures! Plus interesting event at AMNH.

Got a ton of stuff to do at work so may not write a whole lot this week, but look, I actually played with that-there moving-picture feature on my optio. I am slow to embrace new technology, sometimes - totally love the digital photography thing but never quite sure what to do with the movies. This came out pretty though - January 1st, 2008, Sebago frostbite regatta, near Canarsie Pol.


And...
Camera & overdramatized voiceover by TQ - thanks!

BTW for a different perspective on New York water - maybe not quite as up-close-and-personal, but a wholeheckuvalot warmer and drier - check out the 1/12/08 program at the American Museum of Natural History! Looks like a very cool day. In fact all three of 'em do, but the New York one is naturally of special interest to me & my kayaking & sailing friends around here. It's tied in with their Water: H20=Life exhibit. This is one I've been meaning to get to, anyhow - sounds fascinating.

Solstice - and Pool Sessions PSA Time

HOORAY! It's SOLSTICE! Now the days start getting longer again! HIP HIP HOORAY!

Now that means winter, and it's getting kind of cold outside, only mad people (like me) want to fall in the water outside now, so sure as the swallows return to to Capistrano, the kayakers are returning to...

messing about in boats in pools! This is one way in which a kayak is a great little boat - when it gets too cold for you outside (and of course "too cold" varies from person to person, and for any individual person the threshold drops with experience), you just take you little boat indoors & yay, time to play!

I've gotten announcements about a couple in the area -

The Appalachian Mountain Club will be offering pool time (byo boat) as usual at the Greenwich YWCA - they also have a lesson option - details here!

The Small Boat Shop will be offering their usual winter pool options, classes in Fundamentals and Rolling, this year in New Haven - they also have practice time slots with SBS equipment available at a reasonable rate during the rolling classes - check out TheSmallBoatShop.com for details...

More silliness from last year in Greenwich - remember the Fishing Pole Roll?


If you can make it a little further north, Cheri & Turner of Kayakways will be teaching in Wallingford - they co-host these with Connyak & so there are both instruction (with great instructors & fit-like-a-glove Greenland boats) or pool time only (BYO boat) options.

Been hearing rumours about others but that's all the solid info I've got at the moment, plus I'm running out of lunch hour & have to get back to work -

one more pool silliness video - remember, always let the lifeguard know before you do your hang time practice -



and make sure your friends are out of the way before you go crazy with the storm rolls!


yep, pool sessions are FUN!

BTW I knew solstice was in here somewhere but I found out for sure today on Proper Course. Tillerman offers an interesting short essay on solstice celebrations past & present. Ale drinking is mentioned. I'm down with that. I'm just happy the days start getting longer now - boy, the first day I was in Texas wasn't a very pretty one, sort of gray & overcast, but it made me rather ludicrously pleased when I discovered that in Texas, there's still a little daylight at 5:30. I hate it when I manage to escape work at a decent hour & it's pitch black outside.

Although the long days in the summer do make up for it some.

Kayakways workshop 08/12/07

Haluu!* And welcome to the next Post of the Small Boat Shop Goes Greenlandic Series!

Sunday the 12th was another beautiful day in South Norwalk. Somebody was in the good graces of the weather gods for these workshops. Fantastic.

Another spectrum - this time of handcrafted paddles.


The rolling section always starts with a demo. Cheri begins here by demonstrating a very basic drill with the avataq. The avataq is a float; originally it was made from the inflated skin of a seal & was fastened to a line attached to a harpoon and when a seal or other marine mammal was hit, this would tire out the animal. In the US, of course, the avataq are all made of neoprene & I believe the primary use is as an aid to learning to roll. In that role, it's so useful that I am considering getting one. Most of the Greenland-style rolling instructors simply start by teaching the sculling brace with back-deck recovery - I've always found that that seems like a lot to throw at a person who hasn't done anything like that before, and I feel like the avataq really simplifies teaching the recovery. Big confidence builder - the student can gradually lighten their grasp on the float as they begin to feel how much support the water gives & what muscles need to activate & deactivate to get from the water to the back deck, until they're not really using it - but they still have it right there, so they know they can use it & not worry about capsizing before they are ready.


Having begun at the very beginning (a very good place to start, I hear), Cheri then works through a selection of rolls.

What's next, Cheri?


Mmm, how about a nice reverse sweep ("kingumut naatillugu", #6 on the Greenland Kayaking Championship list I have).


Then it's time for the students to pair off & get in their boats. That's another advantage of the avataq - using that for the first step simplifies things enough that even total newbies can work together while Cheri & Turner circulate & gradually build on that first drill step by step. I think that's the best thing I got out of this - a nice, simple, clear series of steps to follow that lead to a roll. I've taught people to roll before, but I've actually been more comfortable teaching with a Euroblade, where I have a fairly set series of motions that gradually build on each other - with teaching Greenland style rolling, I've had some success but I've never had a clear idea of the sort of graduated steps that make it all fairly simple & clear. This was a fantastic thing to come away with.

Of course getting people into Cheri & Turner's boats can be a bit of a challenge to begin with - but once you're in, they fit so well it's like rolling NOTHING. Quite wonderful.


At this point the gopher got assigned a guinea pig & had to put her camera away - but I had to get it out when I momentarily fell madly in love with this little catboat...


My guinea pig was great, picked everything up very quickly, and with Turner & Cheri coming by & giving us the next step in the process as he was ready, he made quick progress. It's such a great feeling when everything is falling into place for someone you're working with, and you realize that they are suddenly doing everything right, and you stand back, tell them "Go" and watch them do everything just right. You always have to tell them that they did it themselves - and if they did it right, it was usually so easy they may not believe you.

One other person got her roll on my watch - Cheri had told me to go work with her, and I did the same set of steps; she didn't get it quite as quickly, she was coming up but it wasn't smooth, the paddle kept getting away from her, when in the Greenland standard sweep roll the paddle is parked right on your sternum. Cheri gave us a diagnosis - there was this funny skip happening & I was having a hard time identifying the cause, Cheri explained that this was evidence that her hands, instead of being quiet & following the sweep of the torso, were getting away & shifting the angle of the blade to a climbing angle. We kept working on it until finally she capsized, and visibly paused under the water in a way she hadn't done before. A moment later, and the paddle went right to where it was supposed to be - and she did a beautiful, effortless sweep.

I'm positive I was beaming from ear to ear when she came up - and I'm sure she didn't need me to tell her that yes, that one was GOOD, 'cause I'm sure it just FELT so much better - nevertheless, I began burbling about how pretty it was.

"You know what made it work that time?" she asked.

I was dying of curiousity. What was the key?

"I thought of Jack".

She's a Yonkers Paddling & Rowing Club member & a friend of my friend & first Greenland mentor Jack Gilman (the guy behind that clouds-and-marsh-grass photo). She's probably seen Jack roll about a million times.

She just pictured what his hands do when he rolls - and suddenly her body understood what needed to be done, and did it.

So funny, the things that work for people.

End of a perfect day - and thank goodness those swans are very used to people & let it stay that way!


One last shot of Turner -


I'm so glad they let me participate the way I did.

ps - I found this, and several other ways to say "Hello" in Kalaallisut (the Greenlandic language) on a very enjoyable site. Check it out if you've got a minute or ten to browse, head on over to Jennifer's Hello Pages - it's fun!

Kayakways Workshops at the Small Boat Shop, 7/22/07 & 8/12/07

As I mentioned in the last post, I'm really looking forward to meeting Cheri & Turner on Sunday & participating in one of their Greenland skills workshops in a different role. Even if that means being up & ready to move boats at 8:30 A.M. in South Norwalk, CT. Oy, and I volunteered to help out with the Sebago Open Paddle tomorrow, too. No sleeping in this weekend - but it will be fun. By gum.

Here are some pictures from the July workshop at the Small Boat Shop.

I am not a big believer in omens and signs, but when you have a perfectly beautiful sky the day of a workshop, and then it one-ups itself by throwing in some nice rainbow clouds...well, it just puts you in a good mood.

as does a lovely spectrum of (mostly) handcrafted kayaks on a dock!


This is Dock Traffic Control - O., you're cleared for takeoff, next paddler please hold for the signal to taxi into position


Entering the holding pattern. The folks at the Small Boat Shop decided that the rolling section should be held at Peach Island, the closest of the Norwalk Islands. The local public launch at Calf Pasture Beach would have been ideal, except that it's closed to commercial activities. Peach Island is less than a half-mile away; some of Cheri & Turner's replicas are a little difficult to handle, so we towed the squirrelier ones - that also gave cargo space, we loaded up the boats with tuiliqs, extra paddles, and a couple of cases of water - it was hot, and those tuiliqs would've gotten pretty warm.


There's that picture of Turner I liked again. Something about all those shiny motorboats and the ancient-looking kayaks...and the hat. Love the hat!

Wagons HO! Peach Island, here we come -


with one quick for TQ stop to play good Samaritan & help out a little kid in a swamped rec boat. That's my guy! :D


Turner had started with the strokes section introductory talk-through, and the paddle to the island was a nice warm up. Now time to get to work. We start out of the boats, to allow the students to just get a sense for how the paddles move through the water & create lift. We start by just playing - stirring, pulling, paddle on one shoulder -

Then we turn it into a stroke. It's really surprising how hard it is to stand in one place & paddle well! I feel like I'm running into these exercises where it's not about moving a boat, just feeling how the paddle moves through the water, more and more often - I don't remember this approach back when I started, but I do like it - seems maybe people have preconceived notions of what they think is happening when they put a paddle in the water & move it & the boat moves in response & when you take the moving boat out of the equation, that lets them really feel how the paddle is actually moving in the water. Sometime I may do something like assign myself a certain amount of time - not too long, just five or ten minutes - and just mess around with how many ways I can move the paddle through the water - different directions, different speeds - without budging my boat at all. Or a non-moving race - who can slice-paddle the fastest without moving? OK, I'm thinking more Euro-ish here but that could be funny!

Anyhow, we worked on strokes for a while & I didn't take any more pictures during the stroke part 'cause I was focusing on my stroke. Cheri gave me a really good but rather demanding paddle - it wanted to be used at a certain angle, and it would find it if your catch was properly canted & then you just let it follow the path it "wanted" to - and if you didn't let it find it, it was no good. Reminded me of a really good horse I got to ride once on a very small trail ride - we went up a creek a ways at one point before we went in I was told "That's a good horse you're on, he knows what to do, if you trust him, stay off his mouth & let him pick his way everything will be fine" & that ws true. It was April, I think, I heeded those words & nobody went swimming that day. This paddle was a little like that, only I don't think I as well letting the paddle find the right course through the water as I did with the horse. There were moments, though.

After that, time for rolling - beginning with one of Cheri's rolling demos.

Straightjacket - in a glass boat. Oooh.


And here's Turner working with TQ - this is right at the beginning, and Cheri & Turner start people out with the end of the roll - getting from the water to the back deck. I had to watch for a little while - it's entirely my fault he ended up taking this & so I really wanted to see that he was enjoying it before I went out & started rolling myself - 'cause once I get going in one of those boats of theirs I become completely self-centered - not in a mean way, just that all I'm paying attention to is me & the boat & the paddle & the roll I'm trying to do!


I couldn't quite hear what was being said here but I suspect it was something to do with getting TQ to twist his shoulders a little more, so that they would be parallel to the surface of the water...


there, that's better!


And seeing things moving along nicely, I went off & starting working on my own rolls. No more pictures - and no more paying attention to what Cheri & Turner were doing with the other students. Yep, even the poor boyfriend was on his own (but in hands I trust)!

Although it would have been SO tempting to stay & watch them work with him. He's got a solid C to C roll, and the first time I gave him a Greenland paddle to try rolling with (long before we started dating, actually), he tried to do just that, several times & then came out of his boat. A GP just doesn't work well that way, it's the sideways motion of the blade through the water that generates the lift. I think TQ had had better luck with a GP in subsequent tries, but the standard Greenland roll is a very different motion than his normal roll, so it would've been really interesting to watch, just to see what steps they took him through to get out of a very thoroughly ingrained set of motions & into the Greenland roll motion - but no, I'd paid for the time & wanted to get every minute of rolling in that I could.

In fact I run into that little dilemma every time I take a session with them - on the one hand, I want every minute I can get in those boats & getting pointers from my favorite instructors - but on the other hand, boy, I know I'd learn a ton about TEACHING Greenland style if I could just resist that urge to do as many rolls in the allotted time as I'm physically capable of pulling off. Thinking that last time - and also, as a Level 2 Trainee who's doing some serious looking around for observation opportunities - it finally hit me - I wasn't planning on taking this 2nd workshop (I'm not on a limitless budget) but this could be the perfect opportunity to forego working on rolling in favor of staying rightside up & actually watching Cheri & Turner teach!

So I asked them, and they agreed to make room for me as a mentor - a sort of instructor-trainee participant - at a reduced rate - and with the added stipulation that I be there an hour before the rest of the students to help get ready.

I think this is going to be really interesting. I hope there's a good range of skill levels, because it would be great to see how they shift gears from a beginner. I have to figure out where my waterproof notebook wound up after the last Lake Sebago weekend, I want to take notes.

Don't know if it'll count towards my BCU observation requirements - but I hope to learn a lot. Glad I have a chance to try this new approach!