Leif and Natalie

So, you've spent a season or two making sure that your mental base is solid and you're centered, well adjusted, and happy. You're competing for all the right reasons, with a zen-like detachment from any results. But… wouldn't it be nice if those results were maybe just a little better? How exactly can you work on racing faster? Here are some strategies and tactics that we’ve found helpful. What follows are not physical training tips to improve fitness, although fitness is a big part of racing and there are many dimensions to fitness. These tips are also not specific technique tips, like “take a more vertical stroke,” although again, paddling technique is perhaps more important than fitness. Instead, these are meta-tips. They’re tips that should help you analyze your own paddling so that you can figure out what small changes to make to your technique or to your lines. The tips break down into a few easy steps. observe others figure out what makes them faster l...

The Snail is my second custom design. The first was the Slug, way back around maybe 2012, when I lived in Fort Collins. Somewhat after the fact, I wrote a blog aritcle about that construction . The Slug ended up being very fast but had a lot of problems. After many years, I have learned much and decided to sort of try the design ideas of the Slug again, but with better construction techniques. The differences in technique between the Slug and the Snail Money. The design philosophy If you've read my other articles (who am I kidding? Of course you've read them because my only readers are my mom and my wife and they have read all my articles) you remember that I talked about how nobody interested in boat building really cares about your boat design ideas, so I will try to restrict my comments here to the bare minimum, but there are a couple features that actually impact the construction. First, my general vision for this design was a very fast but stable surf boat. I tried Ben...

  Natalie reminisces over Stakeout, 2023 Freestyle Worlds, and the progression of the airscrew in the sport of freestyle kayaking. This post was cross posted with one published on the Kokatat team Blog. In May 2023, I travelled to Quebec for Stakeout and arrived just in time to hit Molly for some prime flows and witness the first fully rotated double airscrew by Luke Pomeroy , which is two full aerial rotations before landing. He spent the evening hours try after try, and just as the light was beginning to dim, a huge cheer went up. Two days later, on Cheese Wave, Dane Jackson was the first to throw a double airscrew and stick it , a trick he had been trying since 2013. Dane commented to me afterwards “Seeing Luke get the closest one we have ever seen with such wild rotation got me more fired up to go and land it.”  It felt historical and special to witness both Luke and then Dane be the firsts to land something I would never have imagined was possible within a couple of days ...

So. You have done a little research at the ol' Youtube University, and you are thinking about starting some kind of composites project. ONE CATCH! You just realized that actually you have no idea what you are doing. Your precious youtube videos did a great job of explaining the minutiae of the higher level subtleties in sanding technique or fabric choices, but then you never got any foundational education about the very basics. Good thing I'm here. Let's get beyond basic on resin. The resin is the sticky stuff that hardens and holds the fabric in place. It is the glue. There are tons of types of resins, but there are two main families: epoxy and polyester. (There's vinylester too, and I don't even know how UV cure resins work, but this is supposed to be beyond basic, so the esters are all getting grouped together and everything else is getting ignored. Plus I don't actually know all that much.) When people talk about gel coat, they are talking about a polyester ...

 This blog is cross-posted on the Kokatat team blog I grew up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains and yet until last summer, I hadn’t yet done any of the high elevation Sierra classic overnighters. I didn’t learn to kayak until after I left home and by the time I was skilled enough to run them, I was no longer living in California. But more importantly, I never made it a priority of mine, and for years got swept up in other events and didn’t follow up on what my heart was telling me to do. Growing up just an 1.5hr drive from Upper Cherry, and yet never running it, had been a niggling thorn in my side for over a decade. This last year, I decided to do something about that missing part of my soul and I made a point to return to my roots with a best friend from college, Dan Menten and a new friend James McCleod. Leif (my husband) dropped us off at the West Cherry hike and went back to my parents’ place to hang out with our two kids (Davis 4yrs, Calvin 1.5yrs). We barely snuck in a narrow w...