Gerry Lopez et le downwind

[coolas]

Je suis tombé sur un texte intéressant de Gerry Lopez racontant son expérience du downwind qui remonte à 1980 (sur des paddleboards). Je le copie ici au cas où il disparaitrait de: http://www.seabreeze.com.au/forums/Stan ... -dw-board/

Anyone who enjoys downwind SUP runs usually found in the wide open ocean in places like the Molokai Channel, between Hawaii Kai and Waikiki, Maliko Gulch to Kahului, Maui to Molokai, Na Pali coast of Kauai, might be surprised to know that one of the best runs can be found far from the ocean on a river. The Columbia River has a lot of history, it?s the same one Lewis and Clark followed on the last leg of their transcontinental expedition 200 years ago. Now it forms a natural border between the states of Oregon and Washington. Just at the base of the north face of Mt. Hood is the town of Hood River. In the 1980?s, Hood River became well known among windsurfers as a great venue for their sport. Kite surfing blossomed somewhere in the 1990?s, and another decade later along came an unlikely sporting endeavor that also took to the strong winds so prevalent in the spring, summer, and fall seasons.

For those unfamiliar or just beginning with stand up paddling, it might seem the ideal condition for this new sport is little or no wind. On the contrary, with a specialized downwind board, there is nothing more exhilarating than a run on water with a strong tailwind and the swells and waves formed by the blowing wind. This is a form of surfing where no territorial imperatives exist, everyone has all the space they need and in today?s busy world, a surfing experience that is increasingly difficult to find.

Waves of this type are very close interval, consistent, moving fast and not for the faint of heart when the wind gusts hit 40mph. Steve Gates at the Big Winds shop and Naish SUP boards get together every August to put on a 2-day event and this year the wind conditions couldn?t have been better. On Saturday, the wind was light, making for an excellent course race. Early Sunday the wind kicked in like gangbusters and it was game on for the downwind event. The Elite division fielded quite a line-up with Kai Lenny coming off his course race win the day before, Jaimie Mitchell, Connor Baxter, Dave Kalama, Slater Trout, Livio Menelau, Jeremy Riggs, Cody Kerbox, Kaeo Abbey, and a cast of other top racers. On the women?s side, Candace Appleby, Jenny Kalmbach, Talia Gangini and Karen Wrenn headed an equally loaded field. The 40 Elite racers would start 15 minutes ahead of the Open division of over a 100 paddlers. The course from Viento State Park to the Event Site in town is about 8 miles, the paddlers run upstream against the current that helps to create the waves. With the winds averaging 30+mph, it was going to be a wild ride.

The start of any Elite Race is always an awesome sight. Perhaps the most inspiring part is the stroke pace the top racers generate to try to pull ahead. Most use the Connor Baxter short hold, choking up on their paddles to increase the stroke rate and I get tired just watching the blur of the paddles, thinking of the heart rates and oxygen depletion. In no time, the Elite field was gone and the Open paddlers began to line up for their start. The start in any type of racing is always critical. In a paddleboard race, the other racer?s boards and paddles bang and knock into each other and this first moment is pure mayhem. The idea is to get a quick start and jump ahead of the field. Of course, everyone else is attempting the same thing and pandemonium generally ensues. Sometimes the boards are so close together one is not able to even put their paddle into the water. Someone will fall into another and it can be like dominoes. I usually try to get between two people I know so at least we won?t try to foul each other even though just about anything goes in a start. For this start, we all stood next to our boards, waist deep, watching Steve who would signal when to go. I had my headphones playing my paddle rock music but I saw Steve yell and everyone moved. I?m still not certain exactly what happened next but I pushed off, jumped first to my knees ? and caught a wave. That put me just ahead of the two boards either side of me. When I put my paddle in for the first stroke, I caught another wave and again I surged ahead. Now there are over a hundred paddlers shoulder to shoulder, board to board and just like that I was a couple of board lengths ahead. ?Baby Please Don?t Go,? by Them was blasting and I couldn?t believe my good fortune. Someone from the right was angling towards me, at the last moment I switched my paddle to the left so it wouldn?t get trapped between the boards, ?J? stroked hard to stay left and braced for the impact. The boards bumped, he went down and I was away. Another stroke, another wave, I was in clear water and able to paddle strong and clean. This is the kind of start everyone dreams of. Let?s be clear, I?m not a racer, I?m a guy who paddles in races. I come because I like to hang out and rub shoulders with all the real racers. But here I just got a start of a lifetime. A fast start and a fast run is the nature of this venue, the Gorge rocks.

Equipment is a key part in this type of paddling. The wind waves are not steep and seldom break. Some finesse is required to not only catch the waves but also to stay riding on them as long as possible. The secret of successful downwind running is letting the waves do most of the work. Something one never should do in a race is to try anything new, however, I just got my 1st production sample Surftech Kaiwi-Kai 14? model and was dying to give it a shot. When I saw the forecast for the strong wind, I wavered a bit, thinking a more familiar board might be prudent. But the more I stared at the shape of my new board, the better it looked. Every time I paddled it in our local river, I felt how stable and forgiving it was. In rough conditions, these two traits are a premium especially in the river where the waves come from all sides, current eddies come into play and the short interval buries the nose into the wave ahead almost before one can react. On my new board, I had shaped a displacement bow-entry feeding into a planing hull with a slight concave amidships. The advantage of a displacement hull is that it requires less effort to move. A planing hull works best to ride a wave but before one can ride that wave, it needs to be caught first. The concave just adds stability when paddling in a parallel stance. The outline plan shape is also distinct compared with most race boards that like the narrow, sharp nose, wide point amidships or even behind center and a lot of curve in the tail to compensate for the lack of wideness up front. My board looks more like a retro 1970?s outline with a wider nose, centered wide point and straighter lines out the back half of the template. My design theory goes back to my single fins at the Pipeline compared to the more modern thruster shapes that favored the narrow nose, more hips in the tail. I always felt the narrow nose took away paddling to increase a quicker turning ability when up and riding. Just like at the Pipeline, in the open ocean or river wind swell, my prime concern was catching the wave rather than performance once the wave was caught or, in the case of a board that didn?t paddle so well, maybe missed or caught too late. Downwind running is it?s own kind of animal but in the right conditions and on the right equipment, it sure does make distance paddling fun and exciting.

I got into this kind of ocean swell paddling on a prone board in the 1980?s and built a lot of boards to maximize the catch and glide. The first thing we learned on the prone paddleboards was that we weren?t able to paddle fast enough to catch swells that seldom broke or even got steep. Utilizing a full displacement hull shape, round-bottomed like a sailboat, we are able to use the push of the swell combined with a coordinated paddle stroke and have a chance to catch the bumps. Riding them became the problem because the round bottom was like lying on a log; it just wanted to roll over at speed. By creating some drag with a foot or an arm outstretched like an outrigger gave some stability but to the uninitiated, these prone boards were very difficult to keep upright even in flat, calm water. Paddling them with any kind of power or speed took a lot of getting used to. The modern prone paddleboard has evolved into a shape similar to the SUP boards; stability is paramount because the option of knee paddling is essential for long distances. Standing with a paddle offers more leverage and speed than lying down or on the knees. A Surf-ski or an OC-1 are the most efficient single-man craft for paddling downwind but riding a SUP is a lot of fun because, essentially, it?s surfing. My pretty little start was just a matter of that displacement bow taking the push of the swell and having the board start to go on it?s own. Most of the other race designs use variations of planing hull shapes and need some horsepower to get up on their plane. In the confusion of a mass start, it is difficult to get clean, full power strokes when everyone is so close together. I knew there were a lot of strong paddlers in the field, a few of the guys I had paddled with before were fast and experienced on this course but anything can and usually does happen at the start. So just like that, in the first minute of the race, there were only about 6 people in my sight but I wasn?t going to look back to see who was behind or where the rest were.

And the glides were one behind the other. It?s hard to imagine that waves would come in sets in a river but just like in the ocean, that?s how it was. When one came, it was certain there would be several more behind it. The tail of the board would lift, a couple of quick strokes to connect, a swift shift from a parallel stance into a surf stance, the rapid drop into the trough, maybe another step back to keep the nose from going under, maybe moving all the way back to the tail to keep the nose up and as the trough began to flatten and fill up, another few steps forward combined with some hard paddling to try to bridge the gap and use the speed to transfer into the wave ahead. Sometimes the board would plane across the flat, climb over the wave in front and drop down another one. Back in the prone paddling days, we use to call this railroading. Other times the jump back forward would be too late and the wave would get away. The way I designed the nose, when it did bury into the back of the wave and I wasn?t quick enough, it would stall, slowing down and letting the wave catch up again. Other board designs use a lot of nose kick to keep from pearl diving but too much rocker can push water and be slow. Some boards use a variation of a displacement hull like on a fishing trawler with a pronounced vee in the nose to split the water; this can track one way while the paddler is expecting something else. On all the race boards in heavy downwind conditions, one needs to be quick and light on their feet. My round bottom nose would bury but still lift, the deep vee on the deck would let any water coming over the top drain quickly away to the side. As long as I didn?t get thrown off balance forward, I would just wait for the tail to lift again and reconnect. In a way, this is one of the most subtle forms of wave riding and only by becoming sensitized to this light push and glide, can one put together long, connected rides. At times, a gust of wind would try to blow the paddle out of my hands as I reached for another stroke. I had to keep a firm grip with my lower hand on the return or the wind would turn my blade before I could get it back into the water and I would miss my stroke. On some of the bigger waves, the down angle of the drop would be pretty steep and I found myself standing on the tail with a lot of board ahead of me. Yet from the tail, I could turn easily and aim for the tallest point of the bump in front. Generally the peak of each seceding wave would line up but without a look behind, the only way to gauge where the biggest part of the wave I was riding was by watching the wave ahead. In the open ocean, the swells come from either side; sometimes going left and other times going right. In the river, this effect was more pronounced, one moment I would be heading at the Washington side and the next towards Oregon. The difficulty was not getting to the back of the board, where I could steer, quickly enough because while I was being pushed hard to the left, suddenly another swell from the right would sneak in and try to roll me over. If I did it right, I would be on the tail, turn back right and be going the other way. If one were in a boat going straight and watching my course, they would see me zigzagging from one side to the other and never in a straight line. The other great thing about a course like this is that there really isn?t all that much paddling involved. A couple of quick strokes here, a few there, a lot of footwork, back and forth to trim the board, using the speed from the wave riding to keep the board in the swell and the glides long.

About a month before, while recovering from a broken heel, I came up and went for a downwind run with Steve and his gang. I was on a prone board since I wasn?t able to stand up without the aid of crutches. My board, a 12? state of the art in 1980, hollow, super light shape, had me feeling pretty confident about having a good run. The water level was high so there was a strong current but the wind was blowing hard and as we drove down to the launch, we could easily see the corduroy-like lines of waves in the river. Before stand up, this is how we used to do it and it was great back then. We shoved off and right away I began to connect some glides. But lying down is not comfortable and my two hands do not come close to the area of a paddle blade. The SUP boards walked right away. In no time, it was murder and if I stopped my paddling at all, the current took be backwards. After a while, I remembered why I never went on the prone board once we started to stand up paddle. To make a long story short, a couple of hours later I finally made it to the Event Site, taking twice as long as it would have on my SUP. My wife had my crutches ready for me at the water?s edge. As she grabbed my board, concern written all over her face because of how long I had been gone, I told her I hoped to never have to make this paddle on my belly again.

I guess it was a good thing the course and conditions were so good because I had not done much paddling before the event and had some hard work been required, I would have choked. I got in ahead of most of my friends, had time to catch my breath and watch them come across the finish. Almost all told me about how many times the rough conditions dumped them off their boards. I smiled; thinking about how stable and easy riding my board had felt throughout the entire run. I love everything about that new Surftech Kaiwi Kai board from the shape to the cool looking paint job. I had already toweled it dry, put it back into the bag and had it strapped on to the car. From now on, I plan to keep closer tabs on the Gorge wind forecasts because any run even remotely like this one we just enjoyed is guaranteed to be memorable. Like surfing, no two sessions are quite alike but that is one of the big attractions?one just never knows what?s going to happen. As in life, no matter what gets thrown in the pathway, it?s always seems to work best to keep paddling.

Aloha Gerry