Ok this is stupid!  But on the other hand, you never know which way you’re going to end up rolling.  Once you become a fairly proficient roller (btw, Congrats Kellie K!!!) the next thing you may want to learn is how to roll with your splits.  Meaning "half" your paddle.  The idea is that if you lose your primary paddle, you can grab one half of your spare off the deck and roll up.  You certainly can put them together under water but if you need air just roll with whatever half you can grab.  Well, that walks me up to last nights pool session where I wondered if you could do a backwards split roll. Meaning you hold the paddle blade and sweep out the shaft.  hmmmm.  You’ll see it’s the 5th one down under "fun or trick rolls" on the video page.  (You can also find a "splits" roll right near the top of the page.) Yeah, the good rollers out there will take a look catch it right away.  Simple.  Really.

Whenever you get feeling a bit rusty with your rolls it’s often just because you’ve either not been practicing recently (life does do that to us. . .) or maybe you’ve gotten complacent. You & I both know how that goes as well. Thing is, rolling is soooooooo easy once you know how. Well some rolls anyway! LOL!! So it’s really easy to overlook practice time. Especially if you don’t like getting wet. I can’t imagine it, but I’ve met kayakers who don’t really want to get wet!!

So, in Israel they’ve found a great method for working on your hip-snap. While we in the rest of the world work off the sides of pools, spotters hands or bows, they are working with Hammerhead sharks. Rumor has it that you must practice your hip-snap with a Hammerhead to get it just right. No wonder they’ve got so many great paddlers.

Ok, so by now you’ve heard me say my favorite catch phrase, "what do I know!??" many times, so that has to be a precursor to this post. There are lots of experts out there who can fill in the details but I did want to share what I’ve been learning about the Narsaq or stick roll.

At first glance it’s so stupid. Teach someone an extended paddle roll first. How tough is that? Ah, But wait. We don’t do that! We teach a proper C to C or Sweep. Right? Ok. Maybe, but. . hmm. . . The thing about learning the extended roll first is that all that extra leverage makes up for a whole bunch of errors. Weak hip-snaps and no head-dink will generally not stop the extended roll. Heck even a diving blade angle will often result in a successful roll. Yes, you do go through the fundementals first. You take time working on hip snaps off your hands, you talk about keeping the head down etc., but within a short time you move right into the complete rolling process itself. Guiding the blade, coaching on the fundements and so forth. The result is that you can potentially give your student a victory in a very short time. As little as 10 minutes I’ve been told. My first try at this had my student rolling in about an hour. No doubt this is a sloppy roll. But still, a successful roll that can be repeated without help from the coach. From these humble beginnings we can start hammering away at those touchstones as it were. Focusing on the fundements to tighten up the roll and smooth it out. Then move on to the sweep or C to C from there. Now that the student has a roll they become confident enough to go practice. Something that I found very hard to do solo. But I’ll get back to that.