New Blog 1: Kayaking In Dc

Saturday 3 November 2012

Kayaking In Dc

In most situations, speed is your enemy. Too much speed and you don’t have enough time to think. The slower you can go, the more time you have to plan and anticipate events, and the more time you have to react if something goes wrong. On a typical river, most of the time I am back paddling, bracing, or drifting. Speed is usually easy to acquire, from the current, and with speed comes it’s dangerous cousin momentum. At times paddling a boat in a current can be like driving a car on an ice rink – once you get going in a certain direction it can be difficult to change direction, you can spin the car (or boat), but you continue onward. Each genuine change in direction and change in momentum requires you paddle hard simply to cancel the previous momentum, and to build new momentum. For this reason I try to keep my speed down as I go down the rapids.