2004 East Coast Surf Kayak Tour – Paul Scrutton

River:Other
Skill:All
Trip Date:08/01/2004
Written by: , Posted: March 20, 2011

The second installment of the 2004 East Coast surf kayak tour was held at Myrtle Beach.

I arrived on Friday mid-afternoon, and after getting directions to the competition site, met up with about 5 kayakers. We had a good three hour session in about 4 foot swells. No current drift, conditions were excellent.

In order to maximize my time in the water this weekend, I decided to enter three classes – HP (high performance), Open (waveski), and K1 (aka rodeo boating).

The competition site on Saturday had approx 2-3 ft swells, pretty decent waves early in the day, with conditions getting slightly smaller through the day.

I hoped to break my duck from the previous competition at Ft Fisher, but it was not to be. This competition saw me in last place in each heat also. I was disappointed somewhat with this, but was assured that this was the norm when you start competing in expert category. One of the competitors recounted his tale of spending the best part of a year in last place, to then come up higher in his second year. He’s now making finals in certain competitions.

In each of my runs, I seemed to improve on the previous, which surprised me. In HP, the first heat I entered, I was catching plenty of waves, but not really surfing them top to bottom as other competitors did. My score reflected that, I came in last by a large margin in my heat.

Waveski was the next heat. We had 8 competitors over two heats. That’s the most waveski riders I’ve seen ever assembled before. With the waveski, I was able to cut back and forth across the wave, which was a definite improvement over my runs in HP. Nevertheless, still last place!

My last heat was K-1, which was essentially a rodeo competition on an ocean wave. The scoring was that (at most) two identical moves could be scored on the green face, and two on the foam pile, with one exception – only one 360 would be scored. Joey, the ESKA (East Coast surf kayak) secretary, who I would be competing with advised me that throwing ends in the ocean was just the same as in flatwater, you just aim to the beach. Well, I never tried before, but was surprised that this was a pretty accurate depiction of what to do. I was able to get a pretty solid two ends when riding the foam pile. My strategy was to ride the wave, cut back a couple of times, maybe do a spin, then initiate two ends. This worked some of the time. Unfortunately, I was competing against Joey who works for Necky, and he was nailing entry maneuvers to blunts, etc, etc… He beat out the competition by a large margin.

After I got my results, I was invited to help judge the women’s K-1, and men’s final K-1. The hired surf-judges don’t judge the K-1 events.

I then test-drove the new Necky Spyder surf kayak. And I have to say, they have a winner here. Report info: http://boatertalk.com/forum/SurfZone/683791.

I chatted with Anthony Bell and Charles Salter about some aspects of surf kayaking that I was seeing them perform and they observed about my “performance”, and learned a few things:

  1. When Anthony was top-turning, half of his boat would be above the wave. This baffled me, like how do you get up there. Apparently if you aren’t getting the boat up this high, it’s not really a “top-turn”. So, there’s a goal. This makes me think that surf-kayaking has a lot more in common with skateboarding or snowboarding (a half-pipe), than it has in common with kayaking. Just imagine the speed you get after you’ve performed the 180 direction change coming down off above the lip. The possibilities still boggle my mind.
  2. When the wave closes out, I was resorting to the weiner move of trying to out-run the wave. Don’t do this, it doesn’t impress the judges. The acceptable move is to bury your boat under the closeout. The buoyancy of your boat will eventually release, kicking you and your boat out laterally and way in front of the closed out foam section. You should then be able to make the next critical section (steepest part of unbroken wave).
  3. Lean forward. I wasn’t, my stern was dragging, and it was killing my speed.

So much to learn, so little time.

Anyhow, on Sunday we surfed at Pawleys Island, just south of Myrtle. A very pretty beach, with nice 2-3 foot swells.