|
| The chronicles of Sanjeev Dwivedi |
This weekend was a blast.
There were two WKC trips scheduled this weekend. One was lead by Anne, my WKC class kayak instructor and the other was lead by Toria. There were some rains earlier in the week and all the rivers were running pretty good till thursday but one day without rain and all the rivers except the Snoqualmie drained out. So, it was back to the Powerhouse run on Snoqualmie. On saturday we must have kayaked about 4 hours and then today about 3 hours. By the time we were done today, we were pretty much all beat. When there are a bunch of beat kayakers, they head down to the nearest eatery. So, off we went to the Snoqualmie Brewery. Well, I don't drink but the brewery serves food too and others wanted a beer or two, so that is where we ended up. The food was good. I had a veggie pizza with jalapenos (mexican chilli.)
One thing that I noticed about the sport of Whitewater Kayaking is that there is this mystique surrounding the __eskimo roll__. Eskimo roll is just the process of being able to turn your kayak upright once it has flipped over. It is not an overly complicated process but it is very counterintuitive to every instinct you have. Think about it for a minute. You are dangling from a kayak upside down in the river and floating as fast as the current is pushing you. There might be rocks whizzing by close to your head and as you use your paddle to upright yourself, your instinct is to get the head out of the water before any other body part. The result is that you immediately flip back in the water. No, you must first push your hips out of the water, then the torso and only after both the hip and the torso are out of the water and straightened up is when you bring your head out. The perfect example of why this process would work is to consider yourself standing on a thin ledge or branch and imagine yourself tilting to one side as you are losing balance. The natural way you would correct is by moving your hips away from the side you are falling while keeping your head in the direction where you are leaning. See the illustration for a better understanding of what I am talking of.
So anyways, when I started kayaking, I was an awful kayaker. I had no sense of balance. I used to flip really easy and used to be swimming all the time. The first time I went kayaking on the river. I flipped and bailed from the boat 5 times right at the put in and 4 more times on the rest of the trip. A *lot* of practice on the lake gave me the confidence in my padding abilities and going to WKC pool sessions helped a lot. The paddlers at the pool sessions helped me get my roll initially. However, when the pool sessions ended, my roll was still very shaky. Countless hours practicing at the marina in my apartment complex, and after many many swims finally I got the roll on one side. Slowly, the roll became pretty strong and I went to the river with a new founded confidence. Feeling confident, I entered the boat, crossed the eddy line, flipped over, tried to roll, failed the roll, bailed out and was rescued by the other kayakers. After that, I flipped over two more times on that trip but I rolled back up both times. On that trip I realized that the way I had been taught the roll in the pool was pretty pointless in the river. I mean it was a textbook example of how to do a perfect setup before tipping over and then rolling back up. Well, the swim taught me that you never setup before flipping over in the river. So, I decided to learn to roll back up without setting up at all. So I went to the lane and in the lake I flipped over without setting up and found to my astonishment that I could not roll up. So, after that it was the same learning cycle. I would do a perfect setup, flip over, make mental note of what I was doing to roll back up and then not settig up, flipping over and attempting to duplicate whatever I was doing with the perfect setup. This time the progress was much faster and in about two weeks, I could flip over whichever way and come back up. After that getting the roll on the other side was not that hard. I just realized that learning is a slow process. Initially when I tried the other side, I could just not roll up because I would have no clue of what to do on the other side. I kept trying and after a week, I had some idea. Two weeks later, I could comfortably roll up on the other side and now it is pretty good.
So anyway, after I could roll up consistently, the learning curve just shot up pretty fast. With no fear of swimming anymore, I could do whatever I wanted in whichever way I wanted. It was then that I realized that a lot of the fellow boaters did not have a solid roll. They could roll in the flatwater with setup but I did not see many people practicing tipping over without setting up and even those who could roll in the current could in most cases not roll on their offside. Fellow boaters are mostly amazed at the progress that I have made since March when I took the beginner kayaking class. From a flailing tippy kayaker to now mostly reasonable, rarely-ever-needing-to-swim-kayaker with a reasonably good roll is where I have come to.
Anyway, when I started kayaking, I used to be embarassed about myself all the time. Now I am not sure whether that was necessarily a bad thing. In disguise, I think it was a good thing. My initial lack of balance forced me to learn to roll to avoid further embarassment, which, in hindsight, seems like a really good deal.
| sanjeev@pratapgarh.com |