Nike World Master's Games

Again, it was time to compete in a Big One.

The 1998 Nike World Master's Games

Held on the Dechutes river in Bend, Oregon , the NWMG's were a gamble for me. I had visions of a debacle like the '89 World Master's in Switzerland. It was a little better than that, but not much. I ended up spending 10 hours over two days to help set up the course.

Turnout was pretty light, and the course (in spite of the pictures below) was mostly Class 1-2.or less, broken up by the Class three stuff shown. And it was long too - over three minutes. I thought I had trained pretty well for a grunt race, but I was still out of breath at the bottom. I guess most of the others were feeling even worse.

C-1 Fun

As I mentioned before, I had designed a new boat called the Stinger - to replace my aging Fanatic. Most of the new boats that were available hadn't impressed me much. The new boats were fast in a straight line, but they were meant for elite paddlers. It took big strength to turn them in a controlled fashion!

So I took the obsessive-compulsive route. Just create a new boat! The French Estanguet had impressed me as a reasonable start. It was very fast in a straight line, but the rounded hull in the bow made it especially difficult to turn in a wave.

I had a crude plug from an original Estanguet and started modifying - first by narrowing the bow a bit (it was very wide) and flattening the bow hull where it was originally very round. Fifty hours later...

The first boat out of the mold was almost everything I was looking for. The Stinger V1.0 was relatively easy to turn, and surprisingly forgiving in squirrelly water.

It took running an actual race to realize that the boat had one significant problem. I was unable to sneak the gates as I normally would. The deck was just too high. Some of it was bad design, and some was the result of a glitch I had when making the mold. I had inadvertently added about 1" to the height of the boat. Back to the drawing board!

Another 50 hours later, I had a new mold, which I quickly got to Millbrook. The result is the boat at the right. Big enough to ride over most big stuff, but still sneak-able. And wonderfully fast in a straight line. Even the 1.0 version of the Stinger was 20% faster (!) than my old Fanatic in a 45 minute attainment that I did as a winter workout.

The result: Gold!

Frankly, there wasn't much competition there, but my time was good enough to place me 1st in class and 2nd overall in C-1, ignoring any age class. I even beat all the 40-50 year olds.

Ha!

C-2

Since I was at the Games already , I teamed with Bobby Burton to paddle C-2 . Bobby is a 38 year old Canadian. He had the boat, I had the enthusiasm.

We felt pretty comfortable together, although my relative inexperience made me pretty humble. He had a lot of good advice to give, and it was gratefully accepted. We took about 1/2 hour to get comfortable with each other on Wednesday. Our practice run on Thursday went pretty well too.

Well... - The bottom line was our time was good enough to place us 2nd in the 40-45 year old class (and be the second fastest C-2 there). It didn't hurt that two of the other teams swam.

Silver

Cruising
C-1 Racing
Open Boat Racing