The Sea Dog Race is an event put on every Friday in the spring, summer, and fall by the Fish Hoek Surf Lifesaving Club, and the organizers boast that it is "never canceled." It's five laps of a triangular buoy course out beyond the impact zone at Fish Hoek Beach.
As we prepared to start the Sea Dog Friday evening, the wind was as fierce as ever and the swells were enormous. We waded out into thigh-deep water, waited for the command, and hopped on our skis and started racing. We paddled upwind for the first leg of the triangle, and then rounded a buoy that was anchored some 500 meters from the beach. Next came a downwind leg of 400 meters or so to another buoy, and then we had to paddle in a beam wind to get back to the first buoy and complete a lap.
After the chaotic start I found myself somewhere in the middle of the pack. The upwind leg was taxing physically but I handled it okay. The downwind leg was pretty straightforward but I found the runs deceptive and tricky to catch. The beam leg was probably the most intimidating because of the big swells passing under us from left to right, but the troughs were so wide and smooth that flipping didn't seem like such a danger.
By the end of the first lap I was paddling along with a group of three or four other racers. I think I was the strongest in the group in the upwind and beam-wind legs, but they were much more adept at catching downwind runs than I was. They would build a lead on me in each downwind leg, then I would fight back and take the lead in the other two legs, and then they would get the lead right back in the next downwind leg. Since the race ended with a downwind leg back to the beach, they all beat me. I actually had to follow them just to find the two flags on the beach that marked the finish line, because the sun was so bright in the western sky that I couldn't see them. Somehow I managed to tweak my back while wrestling my boat out of the water and carrying it between the flags. You can't tell it in this photo that somebody from Cape Town Sport Photography shot of me:
There was some kind of computer glitch that prevented the race organizers from tabulating the results. Oh well... the things I know for sure are that I did not finish first, I did not finish last, and I did have a lot of fun. And I can only imagine what doing a race like that every week can do for your ocean-racing skill level.
My back still hurt pretty bad when I woke up this morning, and my arms were so tired they were throbbing a little. Fortunately I had an easier day on tap. Oscar Chalupsky, a 12-time winner of the Molokai race in Hawaii and arguably the most famous surfski racer in the world, was in town to teach a class down at the Fish Hoek Beach Sports Club. Apparently his time was limited, and he's also battling cancer and can't do substantial paddling at the moment, so the class consisted of an indoor lecture followed by a brief session on the water.
In his lecture, Oscar stressed the importance of efficiency and conservation of energy in all aspects of surfski racing. Every racer, he said, should make regular forward stroke practice a priority in his routine. If you really have to fight hard to catch a run, you're wasting energy; you should let that run go and get the one behind it instead. Always stay focused on your destination landmark; not doing so means adding extra distance. You should relax out on a downwind run; being tense costs energy and stops you from executing. Because the main reason people get tense out in big conditions is that they're afraid of flipping, remounting is a skill that should be practiced to the point that one has no doubt he will be able to do it.
We walked down to the beach and got in our boats and paddled out past the impact zone. There Oscar demonstrated what he considers the correct remounting technique--it puts a premium on conservation of energy, he said. We all practiced the technique from both sides of the boat.
My back was feeling somewhat better after this light session. I did some stretching in the afternoon and turned in early when another round of "load shedding" hit around 8 o'clock. I woke up this morning feeling the freshest I have all week.
There was supposed to be a race this morning up on the north side of Cape Town, and I'd planned to check out of my B & B in the wee hours and catch a ride with somebody who could carry a boat up there for me to use, and then return it to Fish Hoek. But the race got called off due to an unfavorable wind forecast over on the Atlantic side of the cape. So I planned to do one more Miller's Run this morning.
I woke up several times last night and heard the wind blowing hard, and I wondered if I was in for another struggle in enormous conditions. But when the Miller's Taxi delivered me and a dozen or so other people to Miller's Point at around 7:30 AM, False Bay looked pretty placid. I paddled out to the rock where Miller's Run officially starts, and found it difficult to get moving on the itty-bitty bumps.
That's something I've noticed about my downwind paddling: I'm not very adept at using the small chop, and when the swells are huge I get nervous and freeze up. Between those two extremes there's a zone in which the conditions seem to make sense to me and I can catch one good run after another. It happened in the Gorge Downwind race last summer: the first several kilometers were a slog in which I just couldn't seem to get the boat moving at all, but then the conditions built into that "just right" size and I found a nice groove.
Today, as I approached the lighthouse a little over halfway through the run, it was finally "Goldilocks" time. The swells were big, but not so big that I felt overwhelmed. Each time I caught a run, I could sense where the next run was forming up. I was no longer plodding around 6 miles per hour. Every time I glanced at the G.P.S. device I was over 8, 9, and occasionally even 10 mph. I searched for that balance between getting a moment of rest on a run and paddling hard for the next run.
My time for the run was just over 56 minutes. That wasn't my best time, but I think it wasn't bad considering how small the conditions were in those first several kilometers. I didn't even break an hour Friday morning when the swells were huge. I think elite-level racers typically break 40 minutes on a good day.
Whatever the case, it was a satisfying way to go out. My paddling in the Republic of South Africa is over (for now).
I walked back to the B & B and had a nice breakfast, then went to my room and packed and cleaned up. Dawid's mother Dorothy had very kindly offered to drive me back to Cape Town. She picked me up at noon and we had a nice chat during the drive.
I'm now staying in an Air B & B in the Tamboerskloof section of Cape Town for two nights. I plan to spend tomorrow checking out the sights a little bit, and I'm also looking forward to some down time after a hard week of paddling. I'm scheduled to fly out of Cape Town Tuesday.
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