nice
we were just down at Half Moon Bay paddling out at Mavericks! awesome stuff. Gotta love warm weather/water.
we took our time coming home and had a BIG day at Trinidad. That place is sweeeeet.
anyway good to hear from you.
steve
914 /6
914-6’s were pretty rare. I only recall ever seeing one or two. Regular 914s were far more common, and among Prosche owners I knew, considered over priced Volkswagens.
I am neither promoting racing nor
– Last Updated: Jan-31-05 10:17 AM EST –
encouraging you to buy a SpeedCoach.
I was simple sharing the facts I obtained after a well made scientific experiment.
In/on moving water like we paddle, the GPS gives quite a bit of a distortion, so it is difficult to compara boat speeds with it.
By the way, it does not mean that I endorse all the BS has been said here about speed :D
Regards,
Iceman
Neat little gadget
Nice to have something like that on the Hudson if only it didn’t cost so much and there weren’t the occasional submerged rocks or floating debris to damage or knock the sensor off. Guess that part isn’t too expensive to replace though, if needed.
Mike
Of course not, and…
didn’t mean to imply you were.
It’s just that for my general purposes the GPS, being a multipurpose tool, makes more sense (right now - if I could only have one). If I were focused on refining my stroke and resultant speed through water a knotmeter would be a better tool.
Wish I’d had one yesterday - and a few paddles before - to see what impact the seat move had. I’m pretty sure it helped speed as I shaved off some time and had less favorable currents than last time I did the same loop (around airport) - but hard to know. A simple measurement of speed through the water would have been much more clear.
It has a break-away mount
Mike,
I tether my impeller mount with a short piece of 2mm perlon so that I don’t lose the $36 impeller and mount subassembly when I bounce off something hard. I use the tethered mount during training and put up with the small amount of noise that it creates.
Cheers,
Jed
Romany versus Greenlander Pro
Unfortunately I don’t own the better Speed Coach Gold unit that Iceman recommends so highly. Instead I have the lowly Speed-Mate complete with all of it’s faults. But I have never known the Speed-Mate to be inaccurate with respect to speed over water.
I trained with the Romany and the Speed mate in the Spring of 2003, consistently averaging 4.7 knots over three hours at a moderately intense exercise pace. (Well at least intense for me, a confirmed non-aerobic type, fat & lazy smoker. A shoulder injury that I sustained some weeks before the Blackburn kept me out of the race that year. To be honest I was relieved because I wasn’t sure I could finish that race in good form anyway.
I trained with the Greenlander Pro and the same Speed-Mate in Spring 2004. Pushing the Greenlander Pro to 5.1 knots at a similarly intense (for me) 3 hours training pace. Recently having stopped smoking and having shed some pounds I was feeling strong enough to take on the Blackburn in 2004.
My official time for the race was 3:32:12. Not being sure that I could finish the race without bonking I backed off on the intensity during the race compared to my training workouts. In retrospect, I was overly cautious and finished with more reserve that an experienced racer would have done.
After the race the Speed-Mate had logged 18.1 nm @ 5.1 knots average. The published race course length was 21+ (statute) miles. I converted 21 miles to nm to get a course length of 18.237 nm. To check my knotmeter, I rounded the course length down to 18 nm and divided by my time in decimal hours, 18.0 nm / 3.537 hrs to get 5.090 knots. At the time I was satisfied with accuracy of the Speed-Mate and left feeling good about averaging nearly 5.1 knots over water for the 3.5 hour event.
Some time later I talked with another racer who had recorded the race on his GPS at a distance-made-good of 17.5 nm. Using his shorter course length, my corrected pace came out to 4.948 This guy had raced in the same class but had a boat fitted with a rudder. So I attributed the difference in total distance in part to the efficiency of his paddling a ruddered boat versus my paddling a non-ruddered boat and some potential distance variation due to opposing tidal currents.
My training pace in the Romany during 2003 was 4.7 knots. The Romany was the only boat I used in 2003 and I never had a problem keeping up with my paddling mates in their longer and faster boats. A year latter in better shape, I logged an official racing pace of 5.090 with the Greenlander Pro that I corrected down to 4.948 knots. The Greenlander pace I used in my response to you was 4.9 knots, I believe. So please if you think I’m being less that forthright, tell me what it is that I’m leaving out. Because from my perspective I’ve now disclosed every detail that could have ever been consider pertinent with regard to my training and racing pace in both boats.
I use a knotmeter to measure distance and speed over water rather than a GPS to measure distance and speed made good because I’m interested in consistency of pace and incremental improvements in my stroke. I paddle in tidal waters so the current induced errors that I would see with a GPS are potentially large enough that I would always question the accuracy of the data. I have no such reservations with regard to the speed over water information that I get from the knotmeter.
I never claimed the Romany to be a fast boat, nor did I ever claim to be some hot-shot or fast paddler. I only recounted the lessons as I lived (and paid for) them to try and help another paddler learn from my mistakes. My sentiment to the original post remains the same. “It’s more efficient, less expensive and infinitely more rewarding to learn how to paddle efficiently in order to gain speed than it is to buy your way to speed via a faster boat.”
Jed
Informative - Thanks!
Between you and Ice - I’m going to talk myself back into the knotmeter I talked myself out of last year!
I like playing around with the numbers as you do. Not that it matters at the speeds I paddle - but there are times I would like to see a speed through water instead of speed made good - and get better stroke feedback. My GPS updates about every stroke - so it’s not useless in this regard, but a knotmeter would be nice. Maybe when the days get longer and I can find time to mess about on the surf ski enough to actually call it “paddling” I’ll be able to justify one.
Good description
The Pintail tends to “hit a wall” more than any other boat I’ve paddled. Trying to push it much beyond four knots is an exercise in frustration. It feels particularly piggish on flat water, but once things get rough, it holds its own with faster boats just fine. It feels very secure when the water gets “lumpy”.