Ed joined Dawid and me again. Dawid sent Ed off on his run, giving him a two-minute head start. Then he sent me, telling me to try to run Ed down.
A downwind race is a race, of course, but you have to approach it differently from a race on flatwater. If a competitor is three swells ahead of you, no amount of harder paddling will help you catch him. You have to focus on getting as many good runs as you can and hope that by the end you'll have done a little bit better job of it than your competitor.
And so, I didn't even look to see where Ed was. I just did my best with the runs, trying to apply all the things I've learned in my sessions with Dawid this week. As I paddled along I looked down at my G.P.S. device, and it seemed that when I wasn't on a run at all my speed was in 6 miles per hour territory. Small runs would push that up over 7 and 8 mph, and when I managed to link a few runs together I would achieve 9 to 10 mph.
Dawid hung out behind me and coached me as we went along. I stalled out from time to time but for the most part I kept the boat moving and felt good. I caught Ed just before we reached the lighthouse.
While Dawid moved over to work with Ed for a bit, I kept going and tried to continue the things I'd been doing right. Most of the time I seemed to cruise along at 7 or 8 mph, but once in a while I'd put together a good series of runs and go faster. The most triumphant moment of my trip so far occurred about halfway between the lighthouse and the beach: I caught a small run, and then a bigger one, and some hard paddling had me gliding down the face of the biggest swell I'd seen all morning. Dawid had moved in behind me again and was yelling "Check your speed! Check your speed!" I looked down and saw that I was running just shy of 12 mph. "It's like a conveyer belt!" Dawid shouted gleefully.
Soon we were on the beach, and Dawid was full of praise for how far I'd come during the week. This was in fact my eighth and final session with Dawid: we'd doubled up on sessions last weekend so that he could help chaperone his son's water polo team on a trip this coming weekend. So a sort of "graduation" ceremony was in order. We went to the C'est la Vie coffee shop to celebrate over a cappuccino. In lieu of a cap and gown, Dawid gave me this nifty jacket:
It's hard to see here, but it has the "Mocke Downwind Camp" logo on the left breast.
So I was feeling pretty good. My back aches even seemed to have subsided. I booked an afternoon spot on the Miller's Taxi and looked forward to having some more fun later. I might have even dared to think I was getting this whole downwind business figured out.
Meanwhile, the southeast wind kept on blowing, and the swells continued to build. By the time I got back to Miller's Point around 4:30 in the afternoon, the conditions were big. BIG.
Once I'd been racing slalom for several years in the late 1990s, I'd mastered the basics well enough that I was quite competitive in races that took place on easier whitewater. But the big water courses like the Ocoee Olympic course gave me fits. My struggles were largely mental: amid big waves and holes that could give me a nice beating if I made a mistake, I usually tensed up and paddled timidly. But I was lacking some physical tools as well: I'd never been an "acrobatic" sort of athlete. I'd always shied away from activities like gymnastics and diving and even turning simple cartwheels. I ended up getting good at running because it didn't require any particular balance or agility, but just simple hard work.
When I launched into those huge swells yesterday afternoon, I felt just the way I had on those big slalom courses 20 years ago. Suddenly my confidence from the morning session was gone. Whereas in the morning I'd been aggressively pursuing runs and seeking to link one run to the next, now I was tensing up. Each time I found myself at the crest of a big wave, looking down into the abyss that was the trough in front of me, I couldn't bring myself to lay down the explosive sprint that would get me riding that wave.
One of the lessons I learned during my earliest whitewater canoeing was to keep paddling in a rapid. I remember one of my camp counselors saying, "If you tense up and stop paddling, you will get creamed."
"Keep paddling" has been my credo ever since, and it's served me well. And it's what I did during yesterday afternoon's run, figuring that at the very least, I'd keep puttering along at 6 miles per hour and get to Fish Hoek Beach eventually. As time went on I finally began to put together a several good series of runs, getting myself up over 11 mph once or twice. In the end I arrived at the beach with a run I'd consider fair. It was several minutes slower than my morning run.
I walked back to my B & B feeling dead tired. South Africa is beset with rolling blackouts--the people here call it "load shedding"--and when the electricity went off at 8 PM, I decided to go ahead and hit the hay.
I was up early this morning to go another round with Miller's. Though the wind had backed off slightly, the swells were just as big as yesterday afternoon. And they were much more confused, with the groundswell-vs.-windswell pattern very difficult to discern. If anything I felt even worse than I'd felt yesterday afternoon. I crept along while everybody else who'd ridden the Miller's Taxi with me disappeared from sight. It seemed that every time I glanced at my G.P.S. device I was stuck in the 6s. Somehow I managed not to break down in tears, though a whimpering voice inside me did keep saying "I wish Dawid was still here!" Indeed, this had all seemed so much simpler with him hanging out behind me, helping me make sense of it all.
I sent Dawid a text afterward to let him know how my last two runs had gone. In reply he commended me for getting myself back out there and experiencing the big conditions, regardless of my degree of success. "Don't worry if it feels hectic. Just one at a time," he said. And he's right. This is all just part of that big journey I'm on, trying to get a little wiser each day. Life would be boring if I had it all figured out... right? At least one thing is certain: I'm a better downwind paddler now than I was a week ago.
There's just a little bit of paddling left for me here in South Africa, but it should be very interesting. More on that later.
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