barry burton

the Eskimo Roll

That’s right. I have one! A fairly consistent one, albeit only on the left side for now. Sadly, this is one of the most exciting days of my life. Countless years I have yearned for this skill, an ability that once attained I realized was not near as complicated or difficult to learn as I always thought. And so the fulfillment simultaneously diminished the greatness of the particular goal. But no matter. I am just really freaking excited. It makes everything else about kayaking so much easier and more fun, because I need not worry about flipping when trying new things, as I can easily right myself.

Of course, this is only in the flat water confines of a pool. I will see this weekend how well it works in a river. As might have been assumed, I am currently taking a kayaking class. The class is composed of three hour pool sessions each week plus one Saturday trip and one whole weekend trip. I signed up for the class in, oh, say January or maybe early February. At this time, I saw that both river trips for the class were in April, but I thought that surely by that time the weather would be much warmer.

Last weekend was the Saturday trip. The air temperature peaked in the mid twenties and the water temperature hovered just above freezing. It snowed most of the day, sometimes hard and sometimes just flurries. The slower water accumulated a thin layer of unmelted snow, making a sort of white water. We had neoprene wet suits but they were really not meant for temperatures that cold. I was the first person to flip, fairly early in the day, and I can in no way begin to describe the alien feeling of being completely submerged in barely liquid water. It is so stinking cold. Way colder than what I can only assume standing naked in zero degree air would feel like. My brain would not really work well. My limbs functioned at first but quickly lost their ability to move well. My diaphragm was paralyzed instantaneously. I kept telling myself to breathe, but until I got out of the water, it just didn’t work. I was very cold and for the most part miserable for the rest of the day, but the crazy experience was totally worth it.

This weekend the multi-day trip. I was hoping it would be warmer, but the mid-thirties being forecast isn’t quite what I had in mind. If you roll back up (instead of wet exiting, where you just peel off the skirt and swim out of the boat) your lower body stays dry and warm so that is supposed to be much better, so I am just hoping that the brain freeze doesn’t make me forget how.

I’m currently working a Parallel Computer Architecture project (microbenchmarking various locking algorithms for shared memory synchronization). It’s due at is due at 17:00 tomorrow and I am supposed to leave on the trip at 16:00, so I’ll be here at Upson tonight until I finish, so back to it.