or bigger
1-2 ft waves are good for practicing edging your boat
2 -4 ft will teach you how to brace and stay upright
I have found that
coming up in an extended paddle layback position is a very secure bracing position to come up in when rolling in large dumping waves. When I’ve come up in this position and instantly get dumped on from the next wave I am in a very strong brace position and able to remain upright. Give it a try.
Try sitting on the back deck…
Makes for great bracing practice…
EJ’s video has lots of good exercises
Once I accepted that bracing isn’t about keeping your head out of the water, but about keeping your boat upright things were a lot smoother for me.
In a sea kayak on of the best places to practice bracing is the surf zone, just paddle back and forth as long as you want.
I Have…
– Last Updated: Nov-29-07 10:37 AM EST –
It's good to be able to relax (not panicking is always good) to scull or roll up. The fact is that it is better to NOT go over in the first place with a well time brace/stroke. My intention is either to surf in or to get out. The longer one stays in the impact zone, the more chances for something to go wrong.
3-6' is fun stuff. 6' plus, the impact zone is not the place to hang out any longer than one has to.
sing
PS. Go talk to Tony, one of the more obscure but skilled pond scum. Ask him how he felt the time we were out surfing a nor'easter, whether he thought the rolling and sculling was relaxing. BTW, we (more I was) excorciated for being an "idiot" for that little storm surfin' fun. What good is "roll or die" if you ain't gotta test it out. ;)
Worse Carnage Comes From Failed
brace. Think about it. If you successfully brace, you have momentary distraction and you continue on your way, hopefully in control. You fail your brace, you have to roll. When you come up, you are no longer in the same orientation to the current that you were originally. You have to take split second to reorient and then at least a second or more to regain directional control. Hopefully, you achieve this before dropping into the next hole or smashing into the humoungous boulders.
The nasty gashes I’ve seen sustained by folks going through the Gap are from rolls, successful or otherwise.
sing
Great stuff everyone!
Lot’s of great ideas as usual. Pool sessions soon, so the tossing the stern around idea sounds smart.
Sing: I was in a recent wave train where I became unbalanced and I thought a capsize was imminent. The ly-back scull was definitely not an option here, paddling harder braced me up, I think…
Thank you all.
WW
What gets me is that in ww you don’t just bomb through stuff. You are constantly eddy hopping. This puts you in a vulnerable position if your boat has a tail that catches water. When reaching for an eddy your paddle will always be out of position for a brace.
Echo that!
Sitting up out of your cockpit can really help improve automatic bracing skills, as can similar exercises – spinning 360 degrees in the cockpit – legs out but rear still on the seat, etc.
I’ve also helped students work on bracing by sitting on the back deck of their boat and causing the boat to tip to one side or another, or simply using deck lines and/or a hand on the keel/hull to twist the boat when they don’t expect it. Add in bouncing the boat up and down and you can create some surprises 
Good winter pool practice.
In deeper water you can have someone climb up and over the back deck a few times, without telling you which side they’re on, or when they’re climbing on or off-- closing your eyes can help with this exercise as well and help the reactions become more natural (along with body and blade alignment).
-Tom
Eric Jackson’s video
Sounds like a great idea.
Maybe, this is part of the problem
"Yet I am finding it difficult to put these controlled lessons into play, especially in ww."
I think the difficulty in using a brace instead of rolling is that the brace has to be employed fairly quickly.
Making bracing even harder is the time people spend learning to be comfortable setting up for a roll.
That is, people spend a lot of time learning the roll as an automatic recovery when they should be learning to brace first (and roll second).
True enough…
…but the brace is harder than the roll though!?!
What happens
– Last Updated: Nov-29-07 12:23 PM EST –
when you start to go over? Do you just tuck and go with the momentum of the capsize?
I brace a lot in whitewater. I'm not sure exactly what I do, but I think that when I start to lose balance I try to drop my elbows into a strong high brace position with the paddle at shoulder height. I try not to reach or flail too much because I'd like my shoulders to remain intact. If you're comfortable letting your body hit the water you should be able to brace back up using a short sweep and snap.
One thing that might help is to rotate away from the water as you capsize, instead of rotating towards it as you would to set up for a roll with the momentum. That way your torso is already "wound up" and the forward blade is in a good position.
If you practice rolls by setting up and going over backwards, you're essentially doing a deep high brace. Try it without the tuck -- hold the paddle in front of your shoulders, turn to one side, and fall over backwards. You should be able to come up by unwinding your torso and driving with your lower leg while keeping the paddle safely in front of your shoulders.
I haven't found much use for the low(elbow-up) brace in whitewater other then eddying in or out.
You gotta put in the splash time.
Never learnt in a pool. Never watched a video. Never had an instructor. Went as much as I could with experienced partners who I thought had a good head on their shoulders that I could pick. Capsized clumsily many times, lived to tell, and learnt. (Maybe I did it the hard way, I dunno.)
Read and run as much ww as you can, once you feel you have a good roll. Bracing becomes instinctual in the lumpy stuff.
disagree…
With proper technique, catching eddies should allow you to have the needed brace on the same side as the stroke. Imagine paddling downstream and you see an eddy on river right that you want to catch. You would do a quick sweep on the left, drop your right edge, and place a closed faced bow rudder on the right side to carve into the eddy. The river current would be pushing your stern down via the deck and the eddy current would be pushing the bow up via the hull and thus if you need to brace, it would be on the right side which is the same side the bow rudder is placed on.
Now if you don’t watch your edges when you cross the eddy line or if you use the wrong stroke on the wrong side, that’s when you get tripped up.
again i disagree…
I have yet to meet a person without a roll who can really brace. On the other hand, a person with a good roll is in a position to practice the skills needed to develop a really good brace so that they never have to roll.
This past weekend, I was working with a guy in the pool who I had previously taught to roll but did not yet know how to brace. After coaching him for a few minutes, he was able to do alternating deep braces with his ear hitting the water each time. That would not have been possible without him previously learning the techniques, muscle control, and comfort with the water gained from rolling.
In my opinion, after the wet exit, learning to roll is next.
I agree with the paddle paddle
[paddle philosophy. Another option for brace/roll is to perhaps try some stern squirts. I find when i do or attempt them i either go right over or sometimes brace to prvent going over. Of course, that doesn’t mean i am doing the stern squirt correctly. Just food for thought. See you downstream.
Surge zone
One of the best places I can think of to help people develop instinctive bracing and the art of not over-reacting is the surge zone (or with a more narrow margin of safety - rock gardens). Inside the breaks in a confused zone, water and currents come from many directions and continually changing directions. The advise I give my students is to paddle as if they are on flat water, basically ignoring the surge. The trick comes in knowing how close you are to being out of balance.
If there is no threat, then the best thing to do is nothing at all. It doesn’t hurt to learn to time your strokes for support if needed (lean slightly towards the paddle). If something does happen to upset the boat (if they are calm before hand), they will learn what kinds of things affect the boat and by how much. A bit of lateral push is no big deal if you are in balance to begin with. But it’s a capsize moment if you are already out of balance.
When I first learned to roll, I was so fixed on dialing in that skill that I didn’t brace for nearly two years. Approaching ever dicey balance situation as a chance to test my roll. Then one day I decided it was time to learn how not to need to roll, so I didn’t allow myself to capsize unintentionally for the next two years. At first I had to rely of deep / high braces, but over time I learned to see the things before they happened and adjust my balance / stroke / body position before a big push hit.
One paddling friend (a very graceful euro paddler) told me he was encouraged to learn to side surf using hands only for support. The balance he developed from this made both his roll (very strong) and his bracing (some of the best I’ve seen) moot points.
cheers,
Yup
Good advise there, John.
another approach is to let your boat get swamped by pulling the spray deck. The loss of bouyancy will make most boat / paddle combinations significantly less stable.
raising the seat a tid does the same thing . .
sitting on the back deck really drives the point home.
Disco’s point about every stroke having a bracing component is one of the things that I focus on. If we are thinking about propulsion vs turning vs bracing with each stroke, then any confusion or need to think while paddling quicky fades away.
cheers,
Could it be
That the majority of us are so focused on sequential mechanics that we are over anylizing ourselves? Kids do what is instinctual, middle agers are trying to learn it like math. Go out in rough water and PLAY!