We recently got an email from Vedharajan; a new paddler living in India. He is training for a large expedition to raise awareness about coastal conservation in that area. We posted info about the campaign a couple weeks ago in our news section.
Vedharajan is working on rolling. Not an easy task with little resources and fellow rollers in his area. I am sure you can relate. He got started after reading a few online articles and watching videos on Youtube.
A couple of days ago, he wrote me to see if I could help him out with some pointers. Since he wasn’t going to pay for a plane ticket for me, Vedharajan did the next best thing and sent me a couple of videos of his rolling attempts to see if I could help steer him in the right direction.
I sent back a couple of comments but then got an idea, why not open the videos up to the teaching community to see what suggestions we can collect for Vedharajan.
Here’s the rules, be constructive and be nice. What would you suggest if this was your student right in front of you? Remember when you were learning to roll, what advice worked for you?
Post your comment and Vedharajan can learn from our collective knowledge. I will update this as I get more videos and progress reports. To post a comment, you just need to be logged in.
There are two other pages of video. Please browse through them all before posting your comments and try to be as specific as possible. Go to page three of this article to post your comment.
Long distance learning for sure.
First attempt at rolling:
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After some initial pointers it is coming along:
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Additionally, if you roll your wrists forward more, that will keep the leading edge of the paddle blade up so the blade skims across the water's surface. If the blade is below the surface, it will surface if the leading edge is up.
I can get the wheels rolling. When put your paddle out 90 degrees from your boat for the C to C roll, you are pausing a touch to long before starting the roll. This is allowing the paddle blade to sink. Take advantage of surface tension, it is quite powerful. Make sure the blade is right at the water before attempting.
You are not using the whole sweep stroke, so you therefore only get a small amount of the paddle arc to use to right yourself. you also need to you push the front of the paddle further out from the boat before your start to sweep.
Hope this helps :-) its what i do and i have never failed a roll.
i can see on the clips that the arms are away from the body, that makes it heavier to roll. keep the elbow at the short end of the paddle as close to the body as possible. for a laid back roll as attempted in the clips, i usually position the outer blade paralel with the surface. then i have my arms in a locked position with my body and let my body go along with with the paddle. at finishing position i am laying in my back on the backdeck. but with the kayak used in the clip it is rather difficult to do a full laid back. so importent to remember for the laid back roll: don't hurt you back by trying to get as back as possible, find a comfortable limit for laying back. if it is insufficient finish with twisting the body.
as mentioned the kayak is a bit difficult to a laid back, so i'll suggest to do a storm roll where the body keeps leaning forward.
there is a clip in this site: http://www.qajaqusa.org/Movies/movies.html
