Burners at Hurley

    At burners today I went with specific ideas to relearn my airscrew as it had become unreliable due to me not practicing it enough.  I also want to learn backstabs or back pan ams which work really well with blunts and roundhouses as a combination.

    For our first session we got on and had about 3 warm up rides because it was absolutely freezing on the water! We then did two practice rides which Jacko filmed for us to review later on in the day. I was aiming to get both of my spins, blunt and maybe an airscrew if I felt daring enough. After the filming we started on working on the specific moves we had planned to be working on. To start with I worked on my backstabs but I kept flushing off the back of the wave. I then daringly decided to move onto my airscrew. This probably wasn't the best decision of the day on my part. I threw one but leaned back as I chucked it and pearled the nose and hit the floor, very hard. When I looked at the damage I was expecting there to be a bit of the seam missing, but not to have split the nose and put a small hole in the other side. Due to this I got off of the water and watched the others paddle from the bridge.

    We went back to Jacko's house to do the video analysis of the rides we filmed earlier in the day. We looked over all of the footage and scored all of our rides. I predicted that I would score about 40 points with spins both ways and a roundhouse. When we looked over the video and scored the rides I managed to score 60 as my highest ride which I was pleased with but know can be improved massively with some more time! Jacko picked up on the way I use my body to adjust the trim of my boat and gave me some very useful pointers on how to improve. Watching Jake's airscrews and listening to what Jacko had to say I felt that I learnt a few things as well as Jake did.

    We went back to Hurley for our second session of the day, all eager to get on the water! Jacko lent me some duct tape to patch up my boat so that I was able to paddle. It was quiet when we got to the weir with about 5 other people on the water. We all did our two warm up rides as usual and started out competition rides. I started with my two spins and a blunt, I unfortunately flushed after the blunt so it wouldn't have scored. Charlie was putting down some solid rides which looked amazing. My second ride went a lot better than the first, i did both my spins, blunt, even landed a back pan am and an airscrew! This motivated me so much for the session, mainly because I didn't hit my boat again! I really worked hard on improving my posture in the boat to gain more control when going for big air tricks. Towards the end of the session I started to confidently throw airscrews and land them! I was even able to land some back pan ams after Jacko joined me on the wave to show me. My last ride of the day for me was my best, I landed a huge airscrew and back pan am as well as an air blunt.

    After the session Jacko went round and gave everyone some things to concentrate on before our next session. Mine was to lead the boat and to not let it lead me. And the other was, when backstabbing to lock up my abs so that I could throw the boat at a faster speed.
Staying clean on my blunt
My boat after its bang


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