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Robin Mousley's Favorite Paddle (posted on Quora)
Rob Mousley, 16 years experience with ocean kayaking on surfskis.
My best paddle was the 2007 Surfski World Cup in Durban, South Africa.
Coming from Cape Town, where we seldom have to go through big surf, Durban had always been a challenging place for me to race. I’d broken a boat the year before, and had injured myself quite badly in surf a year before that.
As we lined up for the start of the race at Amanzimtoti Beach - one of the biggest surfski races ever at the time, with athletes present from all over the world - the conditions looked extreme.
A 30kt SW buster was sweeping up the coast, kicking up a good sized wind-swell. At the same time a 2–3m ocean swell was running at a slightly different angle. The wind swell was slightly offshore; the ocean swell slightly onshore.
The start siren sounded and we were off… I negotiated the surf without a problem, some unlikely paddlers being smacked off their skis to my left. Reaching the turn buoy, I headed left towards Durban city.
I’d been told about how to ride the Durban swells in such conditions - the ocean swells are too big and too fast to catch, so you have to take off on the smaller, slower wind-swells, get speed up and then turn onto the ocean swells…
For the first 30min of the race, I was nervous as hell and played it very conservatively. And then… disaster. I had missed a wind-swell, which meant that I wallowed back off the crest - and was moving slowly, when I realised that an ocean swell to my right, a huge wave, was breaking and I wasn’t moving fast enough either to maneuver out of the way, or to catch it. Instead, it was going to catch me!
So I turned towards it and attempted to paddle up the face. I nearly made it - but before cresting the wave, my ski stopped and started going backwards. I prepared to meet my doom… but the wave gently scooped me off the ski without any violence and I simply found myself in the water next to the ski and… revelation… the water was warm!
Part of what makes paddling dangerous in Cape Town where I live, is that the water is cold and hypothermia is a constant risk. But now, I suddenly realised that I was in tropical waters - there was no possibility that I’d die in this lovely warm, friendly water - at least from hypothermia!
I remounted with renewed confidence, turned the the ski downwind and paddled with a completely differently attitude. Gone was the tentative dabbling, instead I was taking vigorous strokes, accelerating onto the wind-swell, turning aggressively onto the massive ocean swells, swooping down the faces in clouds of spray, whooping with exhilaration… And I found I was overtaking people - even paddlers who would normally be well ahead of me in a race.
A slightly sobering moment came when I found myself a little too close to a reef just before Durban Harbor, but most of the rest of the race was a smashing, spray filled surf-fest…
