Steve, I wish I could help you here but I’m still trying to figure out my own stuff.
I think I’ve hit upon my optimal blade size, and paddle length, I had been thinking 220 was my optimal, for racing, and 230 was my optimal for long range touring or long range touring races+ and since good paddles were expensive I figured I’d split the difference at 225.
I’ll be the first to admit I was probably wrong, on the paddle lenght, after pulling all the paddles I have out.
My fastest race speeds were with the Aquabound Whiskey, I had thought my larger blades performed better but after exhaustive tests on two very different boats I found out of all the paddles larger and smaller than my whiskey, the Whiskey gave me my best 3 mile average at 5.8 in the Tsunami 175, 5.7 in the Tempest 170, and 6.3 in the Tempest 180 (Really 2.5 mi but close enough.)
Playing around with shaft lengths, on the whiskey, (My wife has one.) I ran her 220 and my 225 side by side and again saw that the 225 gave me a slight edge over the 220, about .05 mph in any of the three boats.
Running my Kuiai, in both 225 and 230, saw the same .05 difference in speed, granted I only ran 1.5, miles for this test for each paddle as I didn’t want to skew it be being spent since I’m only conditioned for 3 mile race.
Running my Sea Passage paddles, in 230 and 240 saw a marked speed decrease between the two, from the 230 to the 240 this was a .07 mph decrease. on the 240.
So this leaves me with either 230 or 235 is gong to be the right length, for me and me paddle style.
this is the culmination of “figuring my shit” out over the past 5 years. (and my spreadsheet is getting quite complicated.)
I’m still figuring out the Tempest 180 Pro, learning curve her for how it performs. The Tempest 170 performed exactly as expected. the hull speed math said it was .1 mph slower than the Tsunami 175 and paddling both saw me do 5.8 in the Tsunami, and 5.7 in the Tempest 170. Both of those boats under ideal and non-ideal go respectively the same speed and lose pretty much the same speed, when fighting the wind. but up to 30 mph wind it’s negligible. the Tempest 180 being the fastest boat in my fleet under ideal conditions is not the fastest under less than Ideal.
The only thing I can think of that would affect this is that it sits higher in the water than the Tsunami, or the Tempest 170. making it more of a sail. I’ll need to get more seat time to understand it better.
But I digress, as that’s not what I wanted to talk about today.
PD52, you wanted my pure sprint top speed, I don’t have that info for you its really meaningless because it’s not sustainable. Any idiot, can paddle balls to the wall full on and burn out rather quickly. The real trick here is paddling as fast as you can that is sustainable over your chosen distance.
My sustainable over 3 miles In a race (actual measured 3.2) is 5.8 mph in my Tsunami.
My sustainable in 10 Mile race is 5 Mph.
My sustainable in 15 mile is 5 Mph.
And that requires months and months of training for a few hours tops.
that’s why I only do 3 mile ones now the longer ones are pure conditioning that at my age is getting real damn hard to do.
All of them require me to spend 1-2 hours daily working out TUE-thurs Weight and Cardio Training. and M-W-F Pure cardio for an hour. Measuring my O2 uptake, Aerobic and Anaerobic times and when Aerobic switches to Anaerobic. Then weekend paddling as fast as I can go for up to 10 miles, and for the three months run up to the race every weekend and evening as well.
And even after all this I still get third. So if you’re not putting in the work don’t expect results.
I can’t give you short term duration sprint speed, because that’s not what I train for so that data is meaningless to me.
But what I will do for you is offer, anytime you want to come out with me and paddle, you’re more than welcome to, you can see for yourself how I do what I do, and maybe you can explain it to me because I’m still trying to figure out how I do what I do so that I can get better, because 3rd place in the races means that there are two other guys faster than I am in the 3 mile sprints for the past three years running. And what makes it quite annoying for me is they are 69 and 70 respectively. and generally beat me by around 10 boat lengths.