Paddle Woes

One of the things that's causing my reluctance to commit fully to the coming DW is my lack of sustained speed over the water. It is improving slightly but my times and sums don't add up to a convincing performance. At best I'd just about scrape in under the ten hour cut off time that applies to the first couple of days, and that would be if everything went without a hitch. I had expected to be doing rather better than I am after the mileage I've put in, but there ya'go.

Some time ago I recorded that I was having a problem with near capsizes as I paddled a stroke on the left. Well, despite thinking that I'd rectified the problem, it appears that I've still got it. What happens is that if I've entered the paddle anywhere near vertical and as I apply pressure on the left hand stroke the paddle seems to lose resistance to the water and suddenly catches as it's supposed to be coming out of the water. The result is that I suddenly loose support on that side and I heel over to the left into what seems like a near capsize. Luckily up to now a support stroke has saved me from going over, but it's been a close call on several occasions. 

When it was happening before I thought that the problem was due to the gloves I was wearing at that time preventing the rotation of the paddle correctly. But now that I'm beginning to apply a bit of pressure to to the paddling the fault has resurfaced and it's occurring again and again, to the point that paddling the first couple of miles of any outing is downright erratic and unpleasant. Weirdly it mainly seems to happen just after I've done a session on the a Ergo and it takes half the trip to get it under control. It also seems that to control it I've got to revert to something that resembles a sweep stroke on the left and I've got to get my weight over to the right side of the boat.

My sessions on the Ergo can be quite energetic but I thought that I had got the stroke off quite well. The catch is quite good and the pull through okay, only I think I may be leaving the exit a little on the late side, but that doesn't seem to be the source of the problem. I think that I'm not rotating the paddle enough and in an effort to get to the bottom of this I took my old standard asymmetric paddle for a ride, and it was b....y awful. It felt like it was made of rubber, actually it's fibreglass, and it wasn't a cheap one but the difference was astounding. I could barely get any speed up for the amount of flex in the stroke, and it told me precisely nothing.

Sitting on the bank and using a couple of sticks taped to my wing paddle it seems that the angle that left blade enters and moves through the water is different to the right one. I happen to have a high degree of offset on the paddle, about 60deg, so I've reduced that to 40deg to compensate for my lack of wrist twist and see how I get on with that. On first trial it seems to have improved matters somewhat, but I'm not entirely convinced...