I was feeling insecure
You might not love me any more
I was shivering inside
I was shivering inside
I didn’t mean to hurt you
I’m sorry that I mad you cry
I didn’t want to hurt you
I’m just a jealous guy – j. lennon

Ok, so I’m not ashamed to say it. . I was getting a bit jealous. In fact, verging on envy. Last year was pretty tough. I’d get emails from friends telling me how far and how fast they were coming along in there pool sessions while I stared out at the frozen tundra in every direction. Man, I was jealous. I was falling behind.

I was pretty determined not to let another winter go by like that. Now to be fair, I enjoy winter padding. It’s just the rescue/rolling practice that tends to get cut short by almost solid water. All that winter “he-who-shall-be-un-named” would let me know he mastered his norsaq roll, then hand roll, then this roll, then that roll. . and I’d just watch the snow out my window. It was all very depressing.

This year I was lucky in that I have two pools to choose from. We’ve been able to go play 2 nights a week for awhile now. This means I can put in about 6 hours of practice time on and in the water. Which by the way is a bare minimum if you’re a no-talent slob like me and want to get better. Last night was certainly the pay off.

We took both our little white water boat and the Acuta to the pool. We left the Acuta on the truck for the moment and worked with the ww boat. Mary had a chance to work on her rolls with her new Beale paddle for the first time. Now that she has the extended paddle roll and a somewhat solid normal sweep roll, she decided to concentrate on polishing her ep roll. There are a couple ways I use to work on polishing or “cleaning up” my ep roll. The first is to roll in reverse. You start from your finish position and reverse the roll until you are back up-side-down and in your set up. Then come back up again, then repeat. (just like shampoo, wash, rinse, repeat). Doing this I try to maintain a constant smooth speed and motion. I’ve found by reversing the roll I get a better view of my body motions and correct arms, hands, or whatever that are out of place. The other is to work on slowing your roll down as far as you can and still be successful. The caveat here is that you don’t want to change the roll to recover. I’ve seen people working on this and suddenly gaining a hip-snap to recover instead of concentration on one smooth motion. Some of us are lucky enough to have a solid balance brace which allows them to roll into a dead stop, before recovering onto the deck. *#$^&#@!!!!!! In the end Mary was finally getting that inner hand down, which brought the paddle back up near the surface and her roll began to look very clean and graceful.

Then came my chance to work with the Norsaq. Ok kids, you know I don’t have an ice cubes chance in hell of rolling with it. But I had just seen a video that someone posted on QajaqUSA of his Norsaq roll. What I noticed was that he shoved his arms up out of the water like the “lady of the lake”, then brought them down in a big “THWACK” on the surface, while at the same time he hipsnapped. Now, that was not the way I’d seen it done. Not very graceful at all really. But being that I can’t fail any worse I was keen to try it. Funny. It took about 5 tries before I got the “THWACK” and the hipsnap to come together, but when it did. I was up!!! The second try which is HERE on video, I didn’t really use the big bang. My brain was telling me that was too much work now that the body mechanics made sense. Ok, so after being extraordinarily pleased with myself I got back to working in earnest and rolled off a few more with the Norsaq. Soon it stuck me that this was not all that hard. I couldn’t imagine the extra few inches of the Norsaq made that much difference. So I tossed it into the water and watched it float past Mary who was spotting near by and I dropped over. A couple seconds later I was sitting up contemplating my new hand roll. Amazing! I could not believe it. I repeated the hand roll a couple times and was feeling if nothing else, shocked.

Ok so now the magic is going. You don’t know how long it will last. So off we went out into the parking lot in our swimming gear. Steam rolled off our soaked bodies as we unstrapped the Anas Acuta and slid it off the Jeep. Soon we were again in the water. Mary spotted me at the nose while I began the process all over again. Drum roll?? Total and utter failure. . . (at first anyway). I just could not “THWACK” the Acuta back up. I couldn’t get my back up on the deck quickly enough this way. My mind went back to those more graceful rolls I’d seen. I thought about the angel roll. It’s something like that. I tried a couple set ups, but now I was back to not knowing where all my parts went. I would go under and get confused. OK, I had to re-think this. I remembered seeing the video clip of Mark Schoon rolling with the stick. I’d been just editing it the day before. I thought about how I saw him set up with his right hand crossed under and behind his left. Then his left hand reached far forward along the side of the boat. I tried to make my body do what I remembered from the clip. Then over I went. . .

I sat there for a second. Stunned. When I got my voice back I asked Mary. .”Did you see that?”, “No”, She said. “What’d ya do?” she asked with a smile. “I rolled”, I said. Mary looked and was giggling a bit now, “I know you rolled”, but how??”. I thought for a second and said, “I don’t know”. I explained how I was mimicking what I saw Mark do and then when I went over I just came back up. I really didn’t know what I did under the water. “Do it again.” she said. And I did. Of course, after some time I realized this is just a modification of the angel roll. I just have to be a little more committed. I rolled 4 or 5 times and was starting to get tired. But that was my 3rd “new” roll of the day. More than enough for anyone. After playing around again with some forward sweep rolls we called it a day. I went home, drank 3 beers (which if you know me is a shock!), and watched an episode of “Keeping Up Appearances” before I went to bed. I thought, “That Lydia Hawksworth, I’ll show her!!”

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