New - Sea Kayak Essentials DVD

Sea Kayak Essentials DVD from Kayak Essentials on Vimeo.

Nick Cunliffe & Matt Giblin have just sent us out stock of their latest offering in the growing library of rough water sea kayak instruction DVD's that are gaining a following.
These guys can paddle, possessing elegant rough water skills & showing them off in a well presented instructional style that should inspire paddlers to get out & mix it up among the whitewater.
It features the tide race footage we've all come to enjoy from the This is the Sea series, & enough dynamic water to keep everyone happy, mixed happily with tips aimed at paddlers with a decent grip on their skills, looking for that extra expert advice on how to put it all together.
We have stock on the shelf for $39.95 including delivery nationally, through our online store.

Expedition Fitness for the time poor….

How to meet challenge of preparing for a very committing expedition, with basically nowhere to hide once it's underway, based on historical weather data that shows extremely demanding conditions to be the stock standard daily fare, when you have very small windows of time to devote to training? My family commitments mean weekends, early mornings & evenings are out, so I have had to work out a routine of meaningful fitness preparation around lunch hours & the odd gap where I've got an hour or two during the day.
This has been the problem for me to solve over the past couple of months since agreeing to take part in a trip with Rob & Chris James which kicks off in July, and something I've gone far & wide in search of expert advice to try to overcome.
Chris & his mate Chris Walker, who won the sea kayaking division in the recently completed Harbour Series, suggested an approach favoured by a guy named Tim Ferris in his book 'The Four Hour Body', which despite sounding like some horrendous Anthony Robbins self help bible, gives some very simple & sound advice.
Essentially, the message is to measure. Measure your weight, your times on fitness paddles, your routines, heart rate output, you name it. Measuring gives you a start point, a line of progress & a goal, which any good navigator will tell you is the key to getting from A to B in one piece.

So what to do when you're basically limited to 60 to 90 minute sessions, for a trip that will have several legs where we'll spend upwards of 12 hours on the water?
Asking around a bevvy of fitness experts with performance paddling experience, there is universal agreement that interval training is king. That means spending intervals of time on a fitness paddle changing up a gear & pushing yourself above the general pace that you're aiming for. I've developed a 60 minute paddle where I will go hard for 3 minutes, every 10 minutes, & each time focus on something different, such as form, speed, cadence, leg drive etc. I'm rigged up with a heart rate monitor & have a GPS perched in my eye line, which records my speed & output, as well as telling me how fast I'm recovering. Improving fitness is all about improving recovery, so measuring these things in a palpable way tells me if I'm making progress. My aim is to get this up to 6 minutes on overdrive, with two minutes rest in between, for an hour. It's a goal Max set me which seems pretty hard core!
Here's a readout of my heart rate on a 60 minute paddle where I covered 11.3km, showing the spikes in effort around the intervals, and my recovery rate.

Ideally, those 150-160bpm spikes should be back around 145bpm, and the recovery rates in between back to 125-130bpm by the time of the trip.
I bought one of Dean Gardner's Kayak Pro Ergo machines, which is a phenomenal piece of kit for tuning your stroke & power, and have been spending an hour every other day working on the highest resistance setting trying to improve my resistance strength. That saves me oodles of time, as a one hour training paddle is realistically a three hour absence from the office by the time I get to & from the water.

Chris has one as well & we're comparing notes on how we're both progressing, which is a gentle competition to keep us both motivated.
I'm also doing a lot of swimming, which has been recommended to me by guys with elite athlete training backgrounds like Rob Walker, as being the closest thing to replicating paddling that you can do. I'm now punching out 2km a few times a week, constantly aiming to beat my previous times, and finding the improvement is accelerating as I keep up the effort. Swimming is one of those things you don't have to persevere with for long before it becomes way easier.
I've continued my quest to get my forward stroke in good order, with one-on-one lessons from experts in ski racing picking out the small flaws & giving me something to aim at.
I've used these past couple of months to build a base of fitness that will soon allow me to start working on the other aspects of expedition paddling. At the core of this is obviously getting out & doing a few days in loaded boats, in demanding conditions & working against weight resistance. Going against general sea kayaking lore, this is the sort of paddling that contemporary training wisdom says is really the icing on the cake for an expedition, the stuff you should get your head around, but not necessarily the paddling that will make your body any stronger. This is due to the big toll it takes if repeated over & over. That was advice I was pleased to hear, but nonetheless I'm intending to tune up with some long open water paddles prior to leaving.
I was lucky enough to spend loads of time with Les Allen & Ian Pexton talking about the sorts of preparation they did mentally for their multitude of big committing trips. Of course in Rob I have a guy who's paddled the majority of the East Coast, & in Chris a brilliant all round paddler with heaps of experience in & around Bass Strait. It's not a bad situation for me, not having done any multi day expeditions since before my eldest daughter was born in 2004, & one I'm fortunate to be in.
It's been an interesting couple of months & has opened my eyes to just how much performance you can achieve if you commit to an organised training regime, not to mention awakening the competitive instincts that I thought I'd left on Coogee Oval with my boots & expert phrasebook of sledges. 
I'm acutely aware that I'm paddling with two guys who are real athletes & want to make sure I leave nothing in my preparation that could see my performance suffer when we're inevitably under the hammer. And you know what, all this hard work is also a lot of fun.
Time will tell if it all works; I might end up in a screaming heap after my first hard day on the trip, but I'll only know that for sure once I'm there. It's been terrific so far to be working towards a goal.

Geigerrig - the best Hydration System Ever

Rob & attended a trade show over the weekend & found a hydration system that boggles the mind. It's called the Geigerrig, named after Bob Geiger, the energetic founder & inventor of the system. Bob ran us through the way it works, & we did our best to throw a spanner into his works with the sorts of left field questions that only a sea kayaker with years of experience with dodgy hydration systems can ask.

The system revolves around a super-strong bladder that you infate with small hand pump through one outlet, and drink through a second outlet, which obviously jets presurised water. For a trip we have coming up a concern for us was access to adequate levels of water & the time honoured frustration of having to locate the bite valve & then, under duress, suck on the bugger.

It gets better, the bladder can be fully inverted & run trough a dishwasher, the clips are a closed system so it can't leak, and it's tough. Bob has taken great delight in vidoeing several attempts to either nuke or velocity stress his creation with little success in making an impact.

We have stock on the shelf from this week, offering the 3 litre bladder for $59.95, through our online store. It's so good we think it will soon be the biggest single hydration system in the market, as people quickly see the advantages over the standard offerrings.

Backpacker magazine have reviewed it as the best hydration system they've ever seen - you can read the full article HERE.

Thunderball Revival - the NRS HydroSkin Paddle Jacket

Remember the Bond flick Thunderball, where the greatest Bond of them all, Sean Connery, spear-gunned the bad dudes in his full zipper wetsuit, with Claudine Auger hanging off his left hip?
That was a seriously cool piece of kit, the well fitted, full zippered water jacket, so you can understand our excitment when we spotted a contender for this classic relic in the NRS range.

I secretly ordered one in with a shipment last month to test out, but Mercer, clearly another Connery fan & old enough to have watched Thunderball when it came out, beat me to it & has been flouncing round the Eastern Suburbs seaways wearing it ever since.
Finally we landed our stock this week, so I've had my very own one on pretty much ever since, and I've gotta say, I'm feeling pretty damn Connery wearing it around, with our without my kayak.
It's made from HydroSkin, the laminated Terraprene fabric that seems to be winning fans in a very short space of time, features the Titanium fleck in the weave which radiates body heat back at you, and has a full length zipper to allow you to regulate your temperature. That might sound a bit like some clever marketer's angle, but the reality is that when I'm going for a blast, the extra airflow the lowered zip allows is genuinely refreshing, while the sort of downtime we sea kayakers generally build into our paddles make the 'zipped up' position a great heat retainer.
It has all of the clever design features of the Hydroskin top, including a spandex underarm gusset to remove the possibility of a hot spot for chaffing. For last Friday's paddle (video below) which was as much in the water as on top of it, with a stiff breeze chilling anything exposed, I layered a thin Merino wool t-shirt underneath & felt toasty, without once overheating on the downwind leg, when I was mostly firing along with a lot of effort. For me it's the winter ski paddling top I've been looking for to prevent me from overheating, without sacrificing the first principle of cold water paddling which is 'dress for the water, not the air temperature'.

The NRS Hydroskin Jacket in action, from my best angle….

Best of all, if you're not quite built like Bond in his heyday, the jacket comes in two cuts, a close fit, in which sizes M & L will suit most women in the 10-14 range, and the larger sizes fitter blokes under 90kg, and a more generous cut designed for barrel chests & blokey proportions.
Stock is good, and you can order them through our online store for $109.00, including delivery nationally.

Chilling in the Capital

We held our annual demo day in Canberra on Sunday, in temperatures that I last struck out the front of the Tahe factory in Estonia! The suns rays had the mercury rising above zero by the time we hit the water, but it was a reminder to us soft temperate climate dwellers that there are waaay tougher paddlers around than us!
As is normally the case at this event, things were pretty laid back on the lakeside, with about 25 visitors over the course of the morning & plenty of time to mess around & reaquaint ourselves with some of the elegance of kayaking on the mirror smooth water of Lake Burley Griffin. And no, there wasn't any rolling -  the wettest part of my anatomy was my hands, & I'd lost all feeling in them until the sun started to radiate in the early afternoon.
It was a great opportunity for people to have a go in the Taran, the new Valley Etain & the Zegul Baidarka & 520, all designs that arouse a special curiosity, & tend to put a smile on the dial of the test paddlers.
Thanks to everyone who made it along, we'll see you again next year at a time of the year far more suited to some immersion paddling, we've sacked May as a venue date!

Canberra Demo Day - this Sunday May 15

We'll be down in the nation's capital again this weekend, holding our annual demo day on the lake at Blue Gum Point.
We'll have a great range on hand, including the Rockpool Taran, the new Valley Etain, the Zegul Baidarka, Zegul 520 & 520LV, the Nordkapp & Nordkapp LV as well as the Tahe boats.
Please let us know if you're planning on coming down to say G'day, we'll be on the lakeside from 10am until 2pm.

Sandy Robson - Germany to Australia Paddle

Paddler & adventurer Sandy Robson has begun her journey to retrace the remarkable Oskar Speck, who paddled solo from Germany to Australia just prior to WWII.

She has set up a website to document her travels which you can visit HERE.

Her first stage from Germany to Cyprus is underway & her site will be updated as she progresses.

Best of luck Sandy, we wish you well.