River, show me how to float
I feel like I’m sinking down
Thought that I could get along
But here in this water
My feet won’t touch the ground
I need something to turn myself around
– p. gabriel

Learning all those amazing rolls is not easy, but there are some tips. But to get them you often have to cross over to the dark side. You have to enter a land where rolling is not magic as much as it’s a way of life. Here in the mystical realm you learn that to be a perfect roller you need to leave 2 things at the gates of the cathedral, your boat and your gear.

Chances are you can do a straight jacket roll. That’s the one where you pull your arms in across your body, using nothing but your body to roll. I know you think I’m crazy, but I assure you that you can. Ready? Just head to the pool or your local lake and head out into the water. Oh, and leave your kayak on the beach. Now float. Lying in the water in a back float and looking at the sky cross your arms in as tight as you can. Relax. Float there awhile. Now, roll. Yeah, it might take you a few tries but I’m sure you can do it. Congratulations you just mastered the grail of rolling!!

Oh but wait, you’re supposed to use a kayak right? Well, now it gets more complicated. You see, it’s not the roll that’s difficult but doing it while wrapped up in a kayak with all sorts of gear on. That’s where the problems start. Still, you should learn something about rolling when you try it without the kayak. You learn that it’s not about that boat really. It’s about body movement. Then as we start adding stuff like a kayak or a pfd we have do the same things only now we have to bring more stuff along with us. One trick of course is to reduce the effect of all the kit.

When we roll our bodies in the water we are the ultimate low volume craft. We float mostly in the water, and not above it. Little resistance and very little body bits to bring above the surface. It’s easy. So it’s pretty logical that the lower the volume of the boat the better roller we will be. Generally you’ll roll better in an Anas Acuta than an Explorer. You’ll often roll better in a skin boat than an Acuta. Or you can move to a rolling or “cheater” boat which is just a slivered ghost of a kayak that slips between you and the water. So to get back to that perfect body roll one thing we need to do is get a low volume kayak. The lower the better.

Rolling without a kayak can tell us a lot about what our bodies are doing. The fact is, rolling is all about body motion anyway. Sometimes it’s a good plan to get all those distractions like kayaks and paddles out of the way. Rolling with your body can give you some clues. Obviously you should notice your head is down. It’s floating in the water after all! With your arms crossed how do you initiate a body roll? Shoulders? hips?, feet? All of the Above? Yeah, spinning in the water like a seal you tend to twist your whole body around in on big movement. You don’t hip snap or push down on anything. You just spin. So it makes total sense that the smaller the kayak, the easier it is to roll. However you now have to bring that kayak around as well. So you’ll need to transfer that energy from your body to the kayak. This means you have to be connected to your boat.

A rolling kayak will not only keep you right at the plane with the surface of the water, but it will be a snug fit as well. Often rollers have to be pretty flexible just to get into a small “cheater” boat. First it has an ocean cockpit, so you can’t just plop in. You have to sit on the back deck and slowly easy your body into the boat. Depending on design some folks actually have to slightly distend their knees to get in there. Once in the kayak, they are one with the boat. Their hips are held snuggly against the sides, their legs are pressed against all 4 dimensions of the hull. Bottom, sides, and top. Your legs are flat in the kayak, unlike a standard boat where your knees are bent. The top hull lays across your lap. Your thighs are again snug against the top. In the end that low volume & good connection will allow you to roll almost as if you were not in a kayak at all.

Thing is, now that you’ve wrapped yourself in a kayak one thing has changed, you’re body is now resting higher above the surface of the water, no matter how small the kayak may be. This slight, or massive (depending on the volume of your kayak) change means you have to adapt your body roll. It means we need a little kick at the end to slip the boat under us. . or slide our bodies back up on the back deck depending how you look at it. There are two ways we tend to pull this off. Either we create a bit of resistance against the water with a paddle, a hand or skateboard if you like!, or we scull. Executing an amazing straight jacket roll I’m told uses your body to scull, which gives you just enough lift to slide back onto your back deck.

In addition we can learn something from a balance brace. The balance brace is basically a back float. However the kayak wants to fall back on you and push you under. The trick of course is to find a way to keep the kayak as upright as possible. To do this we twist our bodies and shift our weight to the outside of the kayak (opposite our bodies). We also arch our backs pushing the boat away from us and bringing our bodies back to the surface until we find a balance point. Again, it’s a body thing. The problem is that just because you can balance brace does not mean you can pull off a straight jacket roll. We still have that issue of slipping our torsos back up onto our back deck. That’s the tricky part. The bit that separates us mere mortals from the rolling gods.

Rolling get’s so much easier when you let go of the PFD. Lifting that inch or so of back padding is really tough. On the other hand flotation is a good thing. Traditional rollers have a secret. It’s the Tuilik! Not only does it keep you warm and make you look like an Oompa-Loompa, but it also provides an amazing amount of flotation which makes keeping your body at the surface much easier. A Tuilik is also pretty thin. It’s much easier to slip your body on the back deck with a Tuilik than with a big life jacket. Even in the water a Life Jacket slows you down. Again, try that body roll with and without a life jacket and you’ll see quite a difference.

We often come to rolling in our big high volume boats and scoop paddles all the while wrapped up in 6lbs of expedition gear on our torsos. Slowly we learn to peel bits away to gain more finicky rolls. But another way to look at it is like playing a game of Buck-a-Roo!, where rolling is simple and as we keep adding bits it becomes more shaky until in the end the plastic donkey kicks us off. If we approach it this way we may understand rolling a bit better. Rolling is all about the body. It’s simple. Everything else just complicates it. What we are doing is finding ways to adapt to all that extra stuff. It’s a bit of a deconstruction. A great traditional roller finds success harder and harder the further they get away from the body roll. The bigger the boat, the more junk you have the harder it gets. If we can keep that in mind as we learn our roll, if we can focus on the concept that rolling in the water is simple. If we keep in mind that we can all roll without gear, we start from a positive. Then we slowly add bits to challenge us. Keeping in mind that all the while rolling is about the body and not the boat we may just find a key that will keep us moving toward becoming better rollers.

* Ok just to clarify I of course advocate always wearing a PFD. However, when we are practicing our rolls It’s a unique situation where we are in a fairly safe environment and near shore, even then we all wear those new funky gas charged PFDs.

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