2 Hours at Lee Valley

    On Sunday we had the Olympic course for an hour shared with 2 trainee raft guide courses which meant the queues were short and you could have as many rides as you wanted.


    I started off in my Jed planning to switch to my Guigui for the second hour to see which boat I paddle best at that spot. After about 30 minutes I decided to switch early to the Guigui as I was really struggling with the Jed. I found it had to stick spins and even set up for blunts as the tail is really catchy. Getting in the the Guigui, my first ride was amazing! I did a roundhouse, back stab and an air screw, which wasn't very aerial. This was the best ride I had all day.

Trying for the Air Screw
    For the rest of my time I found it really hard to get onto the wave, this could be because I was breaking in right below the top wave and dropping onto the wave, a posed to surfing onto the shoulder. I feel that this would work better and would set me up for a move straight away.

Getting the ultimate power flip!
    For the last session before selections I feel slightly worried about my performance for this event. Hopefully I paddle at a better standard at Hurley to give me a good enough shot at team.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Worlds 2015

Image
Going to Heathrow getting ready to depart for my first flight ever, which was to Worlds was a hugely exciting experience. I was meant to be taking an hour break to change planes in Detroit but someone in the airplane industry decided to make my first flight exactly an hour late, allowing me to miss the connection flight by the skin of my teeth! Luckily I was put up in a posh hotel and got to see a small bit of Detroit, as well as have a proper American burger! My home for a month/paddling gear drying machine Upon my arrival in Ottawa I was told that my boat and bag had somehow been sent back to Heathrow and wouldn't be coming back till the evening. After sorting the baggage situation out I was met by Dusty, one of the Wilderness Tours staff members who was going to take me to WT. He gave me an insight of what to expect on the river and also spoke about all the other things to do in Canada! We made it to WT just in time for dinner which was great as I hadn't easte
Read more

Kit Care and Re-proofing

Image
My chosen weapons against dirty kit!                     So with all of this time we are spending at home it's a perfect time to get on top of your kit care. To be honest, before doing this blog I'd never washed my kit with any specific washing things. I'd always opted for fresh water and then left to hang and dry. Well there's a first time for everything I guess! For this monumental task I've chosen to use a range of products from NikWax. For technical outwear such as my cags I've gone for the Tech wash and then TX. Direct. For all of my base layers and thermals I will be using Base wash and Base fresh.      Let's start with thermals and base layers, lets be honest, they have a certain sent to them! To combat this they went straight into the washing machine. Instead of using normal detergent I added one cap full of the NikWax Base wash. pressed the buttons that brought the almighty cloth cleaning machine to life, then ran for the hills. Once the washing mac
Read more

Summary Of My Week in Nottingham

Image
    Yet again I was set to be spending a week up in Nottingham training for the World Championships in the coming future. As I had heard from Jamie that the course was re arranged to have some waves on I was expecting some good waves. When I arrived I found there was no inlet gate and all of the features were shallow and very hard to retain, still I had to train and make the best out of it! Going for a Loop     At the end of my first session I went away a bit dissapointed with the course and finding that I hadn't made any progression. Over the weekend Jacko was coming up for burners so I was hoping he would be able to shed some light upon my training. As Jacko was also planning on training hole moves we were all a bit lost. We all started paddling and getting used to the new set up, Jaws was the main feature we would be using as it was probably the most retainable, sort of like a really small shallow Plattling! A key thing I was trying to practise was plugging shallow so that
Read more