As readers of this blog know, I laid out a training plan to get myself fit for my trip to South Africa. But where I live there's not much to paddle but flatwater (more often than not I shun the Mississippi and stay in the harbor in the dead of winter), and I'm not sure there's anything I can do on flatwater that will truly prepare me for the demands of serious ocean downwind paddling. And so, while I'm doing some of the most fun stuff a person can do in a boat on the water, it's felt pretty taxing at times.
This trip has also reminded me of how much I don't know about paddling on the ocean. I've long been a "mountains and rivers" kind of guy: having spent decades paddling whitewater, I have quite a deep knowledge of river hydrology and what a paddler can expect from the many different river features. When it comes to beaches and oceans, I still feel like a complete beginner sometimes. This week I've been learning something new about how the ocean behaves every day, if not every hour.
Wednesday was shaping up to be the windiest day of the week. As we looked out over the Miller's Run from the Fish Hoek Beach Sports Club, we could tell that some huge conditions awaited us. As we drove from the club toward Miller's Point, Jasper offered up one of those lessons in my "beaches and oceans" education: he noted that the tide was in, and therefore the swells should be a bit lower in amplitude in the morning and a bit steeper during low tide in the afternoon.
My run Wednesday morning had its ups and downs; for the most part I think I handled the conditions pretty well, but I was awfully tired by the end and feeling like I'd worked way too hard.
The afternoon offered a change of pace: I would be paddling in a double surfski with Jasper. The swells had steepened with the low tide and the wind was blowing over 25 knots from almost due south, and Jasper said the conditions were perfect for a fast time on the Miller's Run. And Jasper had a bit of motivation to go fast, too: in the morning he and another camper had clocked a little over 41 minutes in the double ski, and now that person was doing some trash-talking, saying that Jasper and I wouldn't beat that time. Dawid said to me, "I hope you're ready to go sub-forty!"
We went pretty hard from the slipway out into the swells, but then Jasper began to give me an impressive lesson in stroke economy. I was in the stern seat, paddling whenever Jasper paddled, and while we certainly laid down some fierce sprints every couple of minutes, much of the time we were just letting the wind and the waves do the work. And we were flying! This was one of those paddling sessions that bordered on a religious experience.
John and Tamsin of Cape Town Sport Photography used their super-charged lenses to get some of the action:
Jasper has the complete package of skills of which I'm still just scratching the surface. He seemed to know exactly how each set of swells would develop and where we needed to be. He'd let some enticing runs go, steer the boat across the wind, lean one way or another, and before I knew it we were on the biggest, most beautiful swell I'd ever seen. Other times we weren't really on a swell at all, but Jasper noted that we could feel the wind on both our ears: "The wind is carrying us!" I was definitely on my toes to keep my strokes with Jasper's, and occasionally getting drenched as the paddler in the stern of a double ski typically does, and absolutely excited; but one thing I was not was tired, because I was hardly having to paddle.
We cruised in to Fish Hoek Beach and stopped the clock at 38 minutes, 57 seconds. So we won that little competition.
When I came back out for another Miller's in a single ski Thursday morning, I was determined to emulate some of what I'd seen while paddling with Jasper. Jasper pointed out that there are some things a doubles team can do that a single paddler can't because of the stronger momentum a big double ski builds up, but otherwise the key to my having a quality run lay in starting small, letting a small run or even just the wind carry me, and then taking that speed onto bigger runs. A good downwind run, Jasper said, is simply settling into a good rhythm that repeats that process over and over.
Thursday morning's run turned out to be my most satisfying of the week so far. I did what Jasper said and kept looking for little runs and letting them lead me to bigger runs. I worked harder than I'd worked in the boat with Jasper the day before, but I didn't feel exhausted when I got to the beach. I just felt... happy.
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