We met again in Bloomington last night for a great pool session, the weather gods were on our side and the rain abated and the temperature was hovering around 40F.
Fran cracked her standard roll, doing well over a dozen successfully, this is a huge accomplishment and it made me incredibly proud for her. Follow this link for pictures from the evening.
In addition to that great news, I also made good progress, finally nailing the crossed hands roll and under Alex’s guidance I added a new white water roll to my repertoire, the back deck roll, I found this one very difficult to get orientated when lying backwards on the deck upside down, but when I took the time to work out which side of the kayak I was rolling up on it worked great.
A couple of tricks that I found helped with the cross hands roll; first push the front end of the paddle down wards when setting up so when you roll up the paddle is already up, then make sure to reach way up high when you are upside down, rotate the paddle in the air not while in the water, and finally try really hard to not use the off (left) hand at all just relax it and keep it out of the way of the power in your right arm. Also I set up with the blade between fingers and thumbs, not across palm and that helped me a bit too.
My final victory for the night was adding the forward-to-forward clenched fist roll to the list.
