Pono House

One of the best things about being on a Stand Up Paddle board is the marine life you can see. It’s always a privilege, even just looking at a little school of fish, or a nice reef. But when you get sot see something big in the water–a shark, a whale, a turtle–it seems really special. And certainly one of the most exciting and wonderful animals to see are Dolphins (or more precisely, porpoises). All you have to do is look at their clear curiousity to understand how smart they are. Given how limited our understanding of intelligence is, I can’t help but think we might be looking at our intellectual equals or superiors.

This video is simply astonishing. In some ways it’s even more interesting to listen to the people talk about the “animals” and the “behavior” as if they were simply parroting a learned response. I have no idea how to make a ring like these dolphins do, and no idea how it could be manipulated like this. I don’t understand the physics.

Simply astonishing. Here’s some Beluga whales doing the same thing.

The YouTube comments are pathetic as usual. For some reason YouTube always seems to show people at [...]

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When you perform any exercise it makes sense to have your body operating at optimal levels, and hydration is clearly necessary to achieve optimal performance. But proper hydration is even more critical for Stand Up Paddle Surfing, because hydration has a profound effect on balance. Try this simple test. Next time you are thirsty, before you drink water balance on one leg, close your eyes, and count how many seconds you can remain balanced. Then drink as much water as you can comfortably hold, wait a few minutes, and repeat the test. You’ll find you can balance much longer.

Not a very scientific test, but it should bring home the message that hydration is important to balance. Dehydration slows muscle response and detunes the fine muscle control that is critical to maintaining balance. There are other reasons too–physical performance, both intensity and endurance, falls quickly as athletes become dehydrated. In the longer term, operating in a dehydrated state is bad for your immune system, hard on your kidneys, and bad for your heart and lungs.

Here’s the kicker–sedentary people don’t have a big problem with hydration. They generally get enough fluids: Roughly a gallon of fluids for men and three quarts of fluid for women per day. It’s the folks that are physically active that are frequently dehydrated to the point of substantially decreasing performance and compromising health. This has been well understood for a long time, most of the data still quoted in journals is from the 1960’s. In random weighings of people working out in gyms with water freely available, more than 40 percent were dehydrated 3 percent or more; for bicycle riders it was more than 60 percent, runners more than 70 percent. A dehydration level of three percent is serious. Here’s the standard dehydration scale:

0% — normal performance
1% — thirst occurs, heat regulation may be compromised, balance compromised
2% — dry mouth, worsening performance
3% — Heat regulation is compr [...]

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Apple’s iPhone is a great tool for anyone, but it has some features and available applications that make it particularly great for Stand Up Paddle Surfing. The phone I’m going to cover is the 3G version, which is handiest since it has built-in GPS capabilities. In fact the iPhone GPS is especially useful since it has special features that increase the accuracy, even when GPS satellites are obscured by weather conditions or terrain.

Unfortunately the iPhone is not waterproof, so you need a dry carrier of some sort. There are some fairly expensive and clumsy hard case versions, but the touch screen of the iPhone makes hard cases problematic. Thin clear drybags enable you to operate the phone right through the bag, and both talk and listen through the bag or via headphones.  My current favorite is the OverBoard case, which has a compact closure system and a built-in headset jack. The only drawback is that the back of the case is opaque so you can’t use the phone’s camera without taking it out of the case. Overboard makes a bag with a camera window on the back, but it doesn’t have a jack. Damn–they’re so close. Maybe they’ll do a mashup of the two cases. I sent them an email about it, but they responded (more or less correctly) that the iPhone camera is so lame that they think most people are more interested in an armband and flotation, which are hard to provide along with a camera window. What they are not considering is geocoding photos, which I find extremely useful. Even a fairly crappy picture becomes interesting when you automatically know EXACTLY where it was taken. Anyway, here’s overboard’s MP3 case, and it really is a very fine product:

As it is the iPhone is great for downwinders and distance paddling. It has a clock, a stopwatch to time your run, it’s a superb iPod player for your music, and if you or someone else gets into trouble or needs a li [...]

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A bit of business–Camelback(tm) is a trade name of the leader in hydration packs. We’re using the name genertically because most people refer to hydration packs as Camelbaks.

We’ll get to the Camelback part in a little bit, but first a little recap of current PFD requirements for SUP. If the U.S. Coast Guard has things their way, most SUP paddlers in the United States who paddle outside of the surf zone will be wearing a PFD and toting a whistle soon. I can’t say that’s a completely bad idea, though the current regulation is nonsensical. You can comply fully with the regulations by tying an inflatable PFD with a whistle attached to your board. No requirement for a leash. Then if you fall in and there is any wind at all, your board will quickly depart, leaving you without a floatation device of any kind. If the regulation were to be written in a sensible way it would require that you WEAR a PFD with a whistle attached unless you had a leash. If you had a leash, only a whistle would be required.

The problem with regulations written by people with limited understanding of a sport is that they rarely make good sense, and so people tend to ignore them even if they partly rational. The regulations have to be enforced, rather than just being made clear. And the officers enforcing the regulation know that it’s poorly considered, so they enforce it sporadically if at all. I have been stopped by harbor patrol, coast guard and sheriffs numerous times, and except for one goofy occasion in Elkheart Lake, Wisconsin, I have never been cited, or even made to comply in any way. Just warned that the regulation exists–generally with a lot of sympathy from the officer regarding the silly regulation.

It doesn’t have to be that way. If you’re in the open ocean, or even a big lake or a wide river, and your board gets away from you, the situation can go bad fast. Even if you’re a fine swimmer the combination of cold water, exhaustion, swells or surf, and panic can turn a minor [...]

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As many regular readers know I’ve been working on GPS features for Ke Nalu. In my typical poster-boy-for-attention-deficit manner I have fertilized this already challenging project with a thick layer of new ideas and redesigns, Ke Nalu into a publishing empire (sort of).

First and foremost is an efficiency redesign. I spent some time analyzing what people read on Ke Nalu and relating that to what features “cost” in terms of load time. As a result I’m reworking how the front page works and making everything a lot cleaner. the Favorite Videos is moving inside the publication. It simply takes too much load time on the main page, Everything is going to be much cleaner and easier to read. I’m taking the suggestions of numerous people and increasing the font size for articles.

The big news though is that Ke Nalu is going to be joined by several sister publications that will share some content and contribute some content to each other. The first publication to be launched is Ke Nalu Downwind, (http://www.kdownwind.com) a publication focused on downwind, racing, expeditioning and cruising. Ke Nalu Downwind is under development now, and if you want to see what Ke Nalu will eventually look like, that’s the place to look. All the GPS technology and Reader publishing tools will show up there first, before they make their way to Ke Nalu.

There’s a lot of new technology being shoveled under that hood, and it changes hour to hour, but you might find the process interesting.

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Rudder or no Rudder

It’s immediately obvious when paddling behind a long board like the Penetrator that rudders are a necessary evil. Tap the rudder and the board slews a little sideways. That can’t be good. So the plan generally is to minimize use, at least in flatwater. In swells, the rudder is necessary on a really big board to keep the board under control. You generally can’t gather the board up and change it’s direction with the paddle once the board catches a swell–not enough leverage to counter the large forces being applied along the length of the board. The rudder is the key, and it doesn’t harm speed in any noticeable way because you’re accelerating like a scorched ape anyway. If you don’t use it you’ll be sideways and then swimming–hard to go fast when you’re under the water. The only other control strategy is running to the tail of the board both to increase your leverage and to get as much of the board out of the water as possible. Shorter board, less counter force–unless the wind is blowing from a unhelpful direction in which case the nose is now a sail

The other time you love your rudder is in offshore winds, or equally useful but not as emotionally charged, in onshore. On a downwinder or even just cruising, the wind is your friend except when it wants to send you to Tahiti. Again, you can actually gain speed with the rudder since you can paddle hard instead of trying to steer with your paddle strokes.

Rudder control systems
The best rudder control system for a SUP is yet to be made–all the ones we’ve tried have strengths and weaknesses.

Tillers: Some boards use a tiller–a long, usually flat bar that runs along the deck from the rudder to somewhere on the nose. Tillers are usually centered by a bungee cord or a springy batten. You turn by pushing the tiller sideways with your foot, and you can sometimes set a little rudder offset (to counter prevailing wind) by adjusting the centering device. Since the tiller is generally in the mid [...]

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George Herbert said that sometime in the 1600’s, still true today. Stand Up Paddle Surfing has plenty of detractors, none of whom have the slightest idea of what SUP really is.

For example, yesterday started off inauspiciously. The North Shore of Maui was due for a decent swell, so I rousted myself early. Ho’okipa was closed out and nasty looking when I passed it at about 6:00AM. A handful of hardy shortboarders were trying to punch out through the channel, but they weren’t getting very far. I rolled into Kanaha about 6:30, polished off my Everything Bagel and coffee from Paia’s wonderful coffee shop–Anthony’s–and got into the water. I have to admit I wasn’t enthusiastic. The sky was lead gray, the water felt cold and clammy, the waves looked messy. There was only three stand up surfers and one longboarder in the closeout waves. I paddled through the channel and decided to try the lefts into the channel because it looked like the best opportunity for a clean shoulder.

The problem with taking lefts into the channel is that the spot you need to line up on is the most likely place to get caught inside. Sure enough, just as I missed a punky head-high wave I turned back out and saw a double overhead face already starting to crumble. I dove into the face, went for a little leash ride. Paddled back out, caught a decent wave that petered out quickly when it hit the rip in the channel, got pounded again and decided to try the rights at the far west end. As I paddled out around the break a really big wave reared up far outsode. I paddled like mad for the horizon and barely squeaked over the lip. The four other surfers weren’t so lucky, and one SUP guy and the longboarder called it a day and headed for the beach.

I caught a few waves, but they closed out almost immediately and turned into foam rides. I finally decided I wanted sun, easy paddling and knee-high surf. Sop I loaded up and went to the west side. I put in at Launiopoko, paddled west and ran into Randy [...]

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Bob (Stoneaxe) remixed my SIC Animoto video. I like the results a lot. More active and upbeat. Shows that in Animoto, as in other things, less is more.

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You may wonder why there have been fewer articles in Ke Nalu recently, and why it’s taking so long to get the SUP surfing and SUP distance e-books done. it’s not just that I’ve been spending all my time getting the crap scared out of me in Maliko Gulch. I’ve been working on a set of new technical features for Ke nalu, mostly minor improvements like a better email newsletter platform, and pagination of articles to support both easier reading and mobile phones (did you know that Ke Nalu has full iPhone support?). But the BIG improvement is going to be full GPS support, including geotagged pictures and text.

Very soon you’ll be able to plug your GPS into your computer, go to Ke Nalu and create an instant article that uploads your GPS tracks from your GPS, and displays them on your choice of maps, including Google Earth. You can write blocks of text that link to specfic pointers you can drop onto the track, and add individual photographs to your track tags, or if you have a set of photographs uploaded to Flikr that were taken along the journey you can grab them and they will be automagically connected to the right spot–or at least pretty darned close.

If you don’t have a GPS and you’d like to show where you surf or do downwinders and build a similar article you can just enter the coordinates and we’ll make you a map, or you can go to Goggle Earth, draw a map, then save the KML file and upload it to Ke Nalu.

All of this is a lot of work, and not only am I a one man band, but I’m also a fairly lousy programmer, so it’s taking a while. But here’s a preview. The functionality is still scattered all over my development sites, but here’s how the display works:

Garmin TCX file split from history [deltazoom=2; gpxspeedchart=show; gpxspeedchartheight=200; gpzcheckpointinterval=5; gpxcheckpointtable=show ]

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So maybe you’re getting tire of hearing about Maliko runs, I think this is the last one I’ll write up for awhile. But this one was kind of special, and perhaps a little stupid. I called the usual suspects and no one seemed to want to go. Just about as i was about to give up, I got an email from Scott, saying he had managed to buy an F14 without waiting month for it, and he wanted to go for a run. This one would be his third.

So here we are, two newbies–Run 6 and Run 3. Off on our own, and the wind was howling. I don’t mean that figuratively, it was blowing so hard that the rack on my jeep was making a mournful howling sound as i pulled into the harbor parking lot, the traditional shuttle meeting spot. There was no one there. Usually there’s a selection for trucks with canoe racks on them–return shuttles for canoe downwinders, and perhaps a few obvious SUP shuttles. This time the parking lot was empty. Bad sign.

We decided to exit at Kite Beach instead of the Harbor, partly because we were getting kind of a late start (we met at 2:30), partly because the wind was swinging somewhat offshore in the harbor and it would be a slog for the last half mile, and partly because neither of us had tried a kite beach landing before. So we dropped off Scott’s truck at Kite beach and continued to Maliko.

No one was at Maliko either. the surf crashing on the rocks at the gulch exit looked hideous–it was filling the exit with foam and spray. We paddled out a good distance, turned left and committed to the run. ZOOM–I immediately caught a runner that took me what felt like a mile. As I angled in the swell to run outwards from the beach i saw why my ride was so powerful–the swell I was in was substantially over my head. I felt like I was down in a valley. Kinda cool, kinda NOT.

When that swell finally passed i realized I was huffing and puffing–i must not have been breathing. I looked ahead and inwards and saw Scott in pretty close to Ho’okipa. “Hmmm, pretty aggre [...]

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I hope readers don’t mind these totally off topic videos. I don’t go scouting youtube for this stuff, but I get a lot of email correspondence from fellow nutcases, and it seems lately that whacked videos, especially as related to race cars or doing extreme extreme (uberextreme?) stuff makes up a large portion. So, this isn’t about standup paddle surfing, or distance racing on SUP boards. Instead it’s about a couple of geeky guys playing around with a smartphone controlled toy car, and a result that exceeds the wildest expectations that the most fevered mind could imagine.

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I NEVER say that. Never. But OMG. Watch this video and tremble.

wingsuit base jumping from Ali on Vimeo.

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I’ve had a few people ask me what’s so special about a Maliko run. Hard to sum up. When it’s big and nasty it’s like nothing you’ve ever done before. Ten miles of hanging on for dear life. I was playing around with Animoto tonight and put this little slide show together. It gives some idea. But when you look at this realize that this is a pretty light day.

The boards shown are SIC F models. They, along with Foote boards pretty much rule Maliko. You can see why by pushing the play button. Enjoy, and I hope this inspires you to give this dance a try. There’s got to be some more Malikos. I’m going to be looking for some on the Oregon Coast this summer. Go find one, and take some pictures, eh?

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Wow, I thought conditions were wild yesterday. Today the mouth of the channel that leads out from Maliko Gulch looked like death and destruction. Waves smashing on the rocks on both sides of the channel, spray everywhere, huge chop in the channel and whitecaps with spindrift blowing off them outside.

Perfect.

There was even a whale on the upwind side of the channel, about fifty feet from the channel rocks, doing a strange body-flip tail slap that I’ve never seen before, along with pectoral slaps that I swear shook the water. At one point he (or she) looked like a freshly hooked steelhead making it’s first splashy, flashy, pissed off run–if a steelhead was 50 feet long and weighed 45 tons. I thought “you stay over there and I’ll stay over here” as I paddled out. Must have worked, she did.

I was paddling with Randy and Chan, Brian, the other Randy (Royse) and Scott. This was Scott’s first Maliko run, and he was on Tracy Dudley’s F16. While we were getting the boards off the car, Scott set Tracy’s board down and it promptly blew over and whacked it’s rudder. I should have told him how likely that was. People don’t expect a 16 foot board to blow around, but the wind in the gulch is very fluky, and F16s are very light.

Bad news, the rudder was damaged. It looked like it might still be okay, but there was a crack up the side. I might have taken this as God or perhaps Karma’s way of telling me to wait in the jeep. But Scott seems made of sterner stuff. So he and Brian wrapped a little duct pae around the rudder and off they went. As we were paddling out I thought “they should have made a few wraps of that tape, if the fin is cracked up the side it won’t be able to take side thrust”. I kept those cheery thoughts to myself.

I stayed relatively close to Scott for the first third of the paddle. We were going about the same speed, and I wanted to make sure he was OK. I remember my first run pretty clearly. That’s not too hard even for my crusty brain since it w [...]

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Maliko run number four is in my official record book. Last guy to the beach again, but I improved my time over the last run (the Maui Canoe and Kayak club race) by 15 minutes. If I keep improving at this rate by the time I have Maliko 10 under my belt I’ll be whipping Dave Kalama’s butt and be first in line for the beer. Nothing like an active fantasy life to keep up the old motivation.

It was a pretty good run for me. I fell thirty times–literally, you can count them on the GPS trace. But that’s down substantially from the 200+ of the last run. I got some great swell runs, and even linked up a couple, a phenomenon that I previously considered some kind of inept description by my fellow downwindpeople. It just didn’t make sense to me that you could shoot down one swell with such vigor that you could catch and ride over the swell in front of you and catch it. Seemed like some kind of perpetual motion nonsense. But it turns out that you can indeed do that, and it feels GREAT! I actually managed a triple, which i celebrated by falling in gripped in some kind of wild surfing frenzy while trying to get over the top of number four. You can see the event clearly at mile four on the trace.

Trust me, it was a lot more exciting on the waves than on the trace. The run was pretty wild. The wind was gusting well over thirty knots, blowing the tops off the swells, and some of the doubled-up swells were over ten feet. You DON’T want to look behind you in these kind of conditions, it’s pretty damned intimidating to see an well-overhead swell running up behind you.

About halfway to the harbor, right off Spreklesville, the swells got a lot steeper, and I started having some problems with Gumby pearling. It didn’t pitch me off, but the nose of the board was well underwater, and that made the tail feel very loose and weird. I tried stepping back, but that made it to hard to catch swells, so [...]

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I turned the corner onto South Kihei Rd and saw whitecaps. Big, fluffy spraying-off-the-top whitecaps, and chunky swells even with the short fetch from Maalaea Bay. Perfect for a fast downwinder to the Four Seasons beach. Diane was dubious as usual, she considers anything beyond a gentle zephyr to be life-threatening, but I couldn’t wait to get the board off the car and into the water. Diane doesn’t mind being my shuttle driver, gives her and Sam some time for some nice south side walks.

I hopped on the board and paddled out a few hundred yards, and instantly regretted not starting at Haycraft Park on the other side of the bay. It makes for such a ripping run when the wind is slightly onshore, and this was, decidedly. I was going to have to work a bit to clear the reefs and that would slow me down. If I had started at Haycraft I’d be riding swells the whole way. It was Nukin’. You can pretty much see from the GPS speed trace that I wasn’t getting any good swell rides for about the first mile–I had to cut too tight an angle against them to get long rides, but once I turned the corner on the Shangri-La reef it was pure rock ‘n roll.

I was paddling Gumby, my Foote Maliko 12, since the Penetrator is back at the Ding King’s, drying out. I punched a small ding in it paddling on the North side the other day–no idea how, I didn’t feel a thing–and it was enough to cause a leak. So it’s getting pumped out to be ready for the next race. Gotta say, the Penetrator FLIES in flatwater. Now that I’ve learned how to get some muscle into my paddling, and i’m not doing balance checks all the time, it just rips.

Back to Gumby and the swells. What a friken rocket this thing is in a hefty swell. Glide after glide after glide. I was looking at my GPS and seeing seven to eight MPH most times. Never less than 5.5. what a hoot. Plus I’m learning to carve the swells to get more speed and better direction control. I’m also learning to get my paddle out further and pull hard in [...]

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Mark’s Big Idea

Kiwi Jackson got sick just prior to the showcase, which upset him as much as it did me. Not only is he a fine SUP racer but he has a couple of very interesting boards and he’s a really nice guy who is always fun to be around. Sick though he was, he contributed a great idea.

We have always offered our readers the ability to contribute to the board showcases by filling out a form and uploading photos, but it’s a pretty low-key approach that focuses mostly on people reviewing the boards they already own. We’ve had a lot of good boards reviewed that way, but in many ways it makes sense to develop that further. Mark’s idea, and now mine, is to develop a group of reviewers who can approach designers, shapers and manufacturers offering to review their board. This will be a useful endeavor both for surfboards and for racing, distance, and downwinder boards, but we’re going to launch it with racing boards, followed closely by surf boards.

Who Gets What
The reviewers will have to opportunity to try boards they otherwise might not have access to without purchase. The shapers and manufacturers can expect a thorough, if subjective review, and our readers will get to see more boards tested from more manufacturers. No one has to ship any boards anywhere, and no one has to give anything away except a little time and perhaps some wear and tear on a demo board. Reviewers get credit for their reviews and can have a link to their website if they have one. Other bloggers are welcome to participate, especially since they already have an interest and skill in writing about our sport.

I am developing a set of forms and examples of the kind of information we want to gather. All the reviewers will be working from the same playlist. We’re not going to elicit or publish unabashed praise, and we won’t let anyone trash a manufacturer. We don’t expect people to be unbiased, we assume bias, and so should the readers, but the informati [...]

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The heavy lump resting against my leg leaped from the bed and ran straight into the screen door, barking viciously. “What the hell is that stupid dog barking at” thinks I. I had foolishly trusted Sam to stay in his own bed, but some time in the night he snuck into ours. I looked around to ensure there were no axe murderers lurking. Nada. It doesn’t take much to fire up Sam, he’s been known to go into a startled barking frenzy over his own flatulence. Barking at 1:37 was not the way to remain in his favorite place. “off to bed you lunatic”–I directed him to his bed, erected the baby gate that ensures uninterrupted sleep, and wobbled back to bed.

I laid back, closed my eyes, and heard it “Slap, slap…slap followed by a long deep breath. YIKES. My scalp tingled. Perhaps there IS an axe murderer. I felt Diane go stiff besides me. “what the hell is that” she said. Diane’s general set of spousal expectations include my taking care of dead things, bugs, and things that go slap, slap…slap whooosh in the night. So I got up and went to the screen door that still had Sam’s nose mark on it. I listened intently, and finally recognized the sound–whale. Out in Uao Bay a whale was slapping it’s tail and blowing through it’s blowhole.

Marvelous.

I told Diane that our axe murderer was safely at sea, apologized to Sam (but didn’t let him back on the bed) and laid back, enjoying the sounds until I drifted off.

I had a conference call in the morning, so no reason to get up at 5:30 to go surf–as if there was any surf. I planned to sleep in, but at 6:30 the whale must have decided I’d slept enough. Wham, wham…wham, whooosh. Our axe murderer was still there and from the sound, either closer in or banging harder. I got up to see and there he was, directly below the house, very close in, banging away. When he or she paused in the banging I could see the whole body under the water. I decided I could probably sleep through this, headed back to bed.

And then the rooster kicke [...]

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In the last segment we revealed our high-tech weighing and measuring processes aided by a $39 scale, some home-made calipers, and a tape measure sacrificed to rapid corrosion after being submerged in the saltwater pool at Ponohouse. So now it’s on to the beach.

We had a few people who had conflicts arise and had to cancel–that was particularly unfortunate because we lost some boards to evaluate in the process. specifically, a C4 Vortice, a Starboard point, and an SIC F18. We also had one shop on Oahu pull out for economic reasons, leaving us short the Bark and Infinity boards.

I’ll explain why that is all perfectly OK due to Mark (Kiwi) Jackson’s brilliant idea in part 3, but for now, we’ll tell you a bit about the boards we tested and the people who tested them. People first:

Our morning session was intended as a BOP-style four leg around the buoys test, but with the prevailing wind we modified that to an up-and-back run between the canoe club flag buoys at Kihei Pier. Our testers were:

Jennifer Konohia, 142 pounds, 5′6″, age 37. Jennifer is a skilled paddler with both canoe and SUP experience. She races a SIC Ku Nalu and generally beats me. I was surprised at her weight, she looks much lighter, must be a lot of muscle on that slender frame.

Jack Dyson, 177 pounds, 5′10″, 50+. Jack is a very experienced paddler with many Maliko races and channel crossings under his belt on all kinds of paddle craft, including SUP.

Dave Schultz, 230 pounds, 6′5″, age 30. Dave is a relative newbie, but he paddles well (and hard) and has excellent balance.

Alan Sidlo, 180 pounds, 5′6″, age 48. Alan is a very experienced flatwater paddler from Chicago. He has extraordinary balance and flexibility, probably a result of his mis-spent youth as a pro skateboarder.

Bob Babcock, 279 pounds, 6′ 4″, ag [...]

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I know a lot of you aren’t really car folks, but this video isn’t really about cars. It’s about what someone can accomplish by themselves, and the extraordinary focus and determination that some people can muster. I found it uplifting.

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