My old tried and true paddle has developed a crack. I’m not sure when it happened. It might have cracked when I banged it on a rock or it may have been stressed when jammed into the sand on a beach. The crack is only 3 or 4 cm long and doesn’t effect the paddle in any way but I worried the blade might break off on me one day soon. It would twist open a little on every trip, the two edges sliding against each other but staying in contact. It could always be snapped shut again but I placed a piece of duct tape over it (the strongest force in the universe, stronger than the gluons that hold nuclei together) to prevent the twisting. I continue to be amazed at the strength and durability of the materials that are available for kayaking these days. However, I am getting ready for a trip to Baja and it did not seem wise to go on a ten day expedition with a paddle in questionable condition. I decided to get a new paddle. A few of my kayaking friends have mentioned that I should upgrade my paddle to one that was a lot newer, lighter, and higher tech.
I talked to Fred Gillam of Riptides and Rapids (a kayak outfitter in the south bay) and he brought a couple paddles to a BASK meeting to show to me. I chose a “Lightning” carbon fiber paddle. Not their newest or lightest weight paddle, but a lot lighter than my old paddle. It is a little longer but has longer narrower blades, making the shaft shorter than I am used to. Instead of a ridge along the right hand shaft to help you hold the paddle at the correct angle, the shaft has been squashed into an elliptical shape where your hands grip it. The blades are a small fraction of the thickness of my old ones, mere knife blades of carbon fiber composite. And this is an old, heavy, thick paddle compared to the new high-tech models available even from the same company today! I wanted to try it out this weekend, but the ocean was not co-operating with 11 foot swell in the morning that increased to 16 by evening. Instead I decided to paddle down the Russian River from Jenner to Goat Rock Beach.
A chunk of the access road slipped away in a mudslide, and Goat Rock Beach has been closed for months now. The State cannot even get an estimate of when the beach will be opened again until after the ground dries out enough for engineers to study the damage. So a paddle down the river can get me to a practically private beach! There was a strong wind blowing, as high as 25 knots, but I figured I could fight my way into that for the short one and a half kilometer trip down river. (Especially with a new paddle!) I brought my parafoil kite and hoped I could rig it to pull me back up river with the wind. I had been fiddling with the harness on my parafoil kite in the hopes of converting it to work with two strings to make it steerable.
The trip down the river was uneventful and a little easier than I had expected. I think there was still a strong current going towards the ocean and this partially compensated for the wind. I landed well south of the end of the spit to avoid bothering the 150 harbor seals reported to be there for the spring pupping season. I had taken the two-string handles from an old stunt kite along to try on the parafoil, but when I started setting things up, I discovered that the two strings had been wound together around both handles. I tried letting the kite pull the string out for me, but it behaved poorly in the strong wind. After several attempts the kite managed to tangle the pair of strings into an impossible ball of knots. I sat down for half an hour and managed to get five meters of string out of the knot. With this I tried to launch the kite with one string to pull me back up the river.
I tried and failed to keep the kite up while launching the kayak, then just drifted while trying to launch the kite from the water. It fell in a few times and started working even worse when wet. Finally I gave up completely and put it away. By then the wind had blown the kayak partway back out across the river. I discovered that I was actually drifting slowly towards the ocean again in the center of the current, which was stronger than the wind! But it still seemed a lot easier to turn away from the wind and start paddling back to the boat ramp. Certainly easier than trying to launch that darn kite!
The wind was strong enough to fetch up some reasonable waves and I tried again to catch them for a ride. I watched the waves recently on Tomales Bay and think I have seen something interesting. When you watch a set of waves coming towards you they seem to move very fast but take too long to get to you. I think I am seeing the phase velocity of the waves, and the speed of the group of waves is actually slower than that. A wave forms on the back of the set, rises up to the middle, then shrinks to the front of the group and disappears. More waves form in the back and run to the front as the whole group moves at a much slower speed. So when I saw large waves in front of me, I tried paddling towards them figuring I only had to beat the group velocity. This seemed to work and I got some surprising rides on the Russian River. One wave moved me so fast it plowed the bow of my boat under the next wave in front of it!
My new paddle performed very nicely, and I got a lot of exercise on a day that I once would have stayed off the water completely. That evening I spent an hour untangling the strings and separating them for a two-string test tomorrow.