If you come to boston meet Sanjay
Euro, greenland, wing, racing, hand rolling, all that and generous too.
Then there's Greg Barton. At his workshop he told me that paddling with a wing would sort out my euro stroke, (but then again he was trying to sell me a second epic paddle. BTW, His work shop was some of the wisest paddling related money I have ever spent.)
Sanjay, sorry for posting this but....
I do
I still use the Euro in my plastic SOTs. Transition back and forth is no big deal, although going from a 17" beam to a 26" beam doesn’t do great things for my stroke.
but do you like the feeling???
Dave, I don't doubt you can do it, but how many poeple go back and forth between a Scupper and a Mako :D
After more than one year an a half without using an Euro, two weeks ago, I paddled for a couples of feet with an Euro (rescuing a kayak), I would rather not to paddle at all than to use an Euro again.
Regards,
Iceman
To paddle Vs. To paddle
"Successfully"
Peter,
Sanjay is not a good example because he has stated several times that he does not like very much the wing, and that is the reason why I said "successfully."
To paddle "successfully" with a wing requires a great deal of specialization, training, and time and the Euro as well as the greenland strokes don't help at all to master the wing paddle stroke.
This is what the wing stroke should look like:
http://www.kayaksport.net/technique/movies/Vereckei.mpeg
Regards,
Iceman
PS: Ask in the surfski yahoo group and you will see what they say about it...
I like 'em both
But I do need something in between!
hey ICE man
I agree, I use my wing for everything, and recently I was paddling my Old Whetstone full carbon euro, a nice paddle, well it felt horrible and wanted to go all over the place!! Once you go wing it is hard to go back or transition back & forth. I was only using my euro because I didn’t want to use my wing in the swamp. But man did it feel weird… Its hard to describe but the wing is consistent every stroke is EXACTALLY the same. With the Euro sometimes it has a different feel to it; the wing due to its shape seems to always find the perfect track in the water. But really I am a relative newbee with the wing less then a year but I am a total convert!!
Mako
Ha. Badge of honor that one-like paddling a Speedster. Wing buys you a little more time before swimming. Combination brace and forward stroke… Tried an old 50s era wooden K-1 some weeks ago-if not for the wing, I never would have made it 20 strokes. I’m sure I provided comic relief for any onlookers.
Just picked up a Custom Kayaks Mark 1 ski. Carbon, almost 21 feet long. Whoohoo. Back to the temple I go, and with New England water temps a droppin’. Smile.
Blackburn
Hi Dave,
I gotta agree with Ice. At the Blackburn they make you use a euro in the touring class and I have always hated transitioning back to the euro to prepare for the Blackburn. I even found it to be more prone to injury and I had to ease back into it by lowering my miles. the sure grip of a wing is more than about speed in the sense that every forward stoke counts as a point of contact type brace in a tippy boat, ie stability. If a paddler goes out and has zero braces in a session, then maybe they have begun to successfully use the wing, and the boat feels less tippy.
For myself, I don’t think I would use a wing in whitewater unless I was doing a downriver race. In a WW boat, playing on a river, a wing would be limiting and easy to break on a rock. Actually come to think of it it might be fun to try a beat up old wing on a river as an experiment. I never did like that dufek stroke anyway. Its been more than a few years since I paddled a river.
I don’t put many miles on the
Euro/Scupper combination, which may be why it’s still comfortable. The last time I did much distance with it, it wasn’t a lot of fun. I’d like to get some time in a faster boat with a Euro and see whether I have the same reaction you guys have, but I’m not about to mess around with it in the Mako. OTOH, I think the Scupper is so wide that it would be tough to maintain anything like decent stroke form with the wing, although I have to admit I haven’t tried it.
FWIW, I found the initial transition from Euro to wing very smooth, aside from a handful of swims when I tried to make the wing do something it didn’t want to do.
not disputing that
If the wing was ideal for whitewater then the slalom and downriver folks would all be using them. I’d like to see someone pivot a boat around a gate reliably in competition with a wing. I just posted a link to that SA gallery to illustrate that wings can be used in multiple conditions, some pretty hairy. Wings are pretty versatile even if not ideal for maneuvering. There are a couple of shots in there in which guy in K2s are burried to their necks punching through a big hole. Of course those guys aren’t using ideal boats for the rapids either. Those races are many 10s of kilometers long and they just survive the bigger rapids and drops and make speed on the rest of the water using fast boats and wings. It’s amazing what conditions a low brace, good balance, and a solid forward stroke can tackle.
Odd feeling
I haven't been able to prove that only because of using a wing I might go 3,4, or 5% faster as other states.
However, the forward stroke improves a great deal with proper training and using a wing --to the point where it is not possible to do so using other kinds of paddles.
On the whole, one become faster because the wing allow to perform a proper forward stroke, and it gives so much support that it is not needed to waste time and energy using fancy braces. As seawave said, "If a paddler goes out and has zero braces in a session, then maybe they have begun to successfully use the wing, and the boat feels less tippy".
Regards,
Iceman