Lord, hey,
while you’re down there
lookin’ up my nose,
yeah,
child you’re gettin’ mighty like a rose.
– van morrison

Nothing like an evening in the water to clear your head. The only draw back was forgetting my skirt!!  Oh, well regardless of what many new paddlers may have heard, you can roll without a skirt.  In fact it’s often easier. However it’s similar to rolling a loaded kayak in that your moves have to be slow and go with the natural motion of the kayak.  You can’t really “muscle” a flooded kayak.  Something interesting with the Rockpool Alaw Bach is that it really does not want to sit upside down without a paddler in it.  Empty it sits a bit on an angle.  There is a suprising upside to this behavior, It’s hard to fill with water.  Amazingly I could roll all evening without a skirt on the boat and never flood the cockpit more than 50% or less. Now if I sat on the back on the other hand. . . .

I’ve said many times before that spending time just screwing off is as important as “real” practice.  I’m always trying to find new ways to roll the boat.  You can see from the set up here, that besides trying to avoid the smell of chlorine, I was also holding the paddle near the end.  Over time I’ve become quite proficient at rolling no matter where I happen to have a grip on the paddle.  Holding it near the end like this is really just a stick roll with the added buoyancy of the rest of the paddle, another good way to work up to a Norsaq roll.

Without the skirt, I figured it was a good time to learn how to roll with one leg out of the kayak.  The hard part is staying in when you flip.  I tried hooking a toe under the bungees, but in the end, just settled for really gripping the boat under my inside knee.  It’s not hard to do, but the recovery is not pretty. You sort of look like a frog strapped to a board.

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