I have signed up for a race this weekend: the Rock Island Paddle Rampage on Center Hill Reservoir near McMinnville, Tennessee, on Sunday. It's 14 miles, or about 23 kilometers. I'll try to handle that distance more wisely than I did up at the USCA Nationals three weeks ago.
This week has been a somewhat frustrating one as the rudder line issue on my six-year-old surf ski went from a small problem to a big problem. I received my new set of lines in the mail and went down to the dock Tuesday morning thinking that installing them would be a simple matter of carefully joining them with tape to the ends of the old lines and using the old lines to pull them through the tubes; but the tape junction failed and now the old lines are out while the new lines are not yet in.
The Epic Kayaks channel on You Tube has a couple of videos of former Epic principal Oscar Chalupsky demonstrating two methods of installing rudder lines--one using a vacuum cleaner to suck the line through the tube, and one using a stiffer wire inserted through the tube to pull the line through. I tried both methods with no success, and what I ultimately discovered is that both tubes are broken inside the boat.
I ended up not paddling at all on Tuesday, and that put me in a foul mood. I spent Wednesday letting the dejection run its course, and yesterday I took my new boat down to the riverfront and am now forgetting the mechanical woes for the moment and focusing on being ready for Sunday's race.
I'll get back to working on those rudder lines soon enough, and I'll post more here about the project as it happens. Barring some kind of epiphany that includes a snappy solution to the problem, the old boat will be going under the knife.
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