Maliko V and Explanations

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 was only four runs ago. He seemed to be dong fine. Right about as we passed Kuau the swells got kind of sporty and big, I had to pay close attention to what I was doing. At about 1.5 miles I fell down (as you can see below) and when I got back on the board I looked for Scott–no sign. I waited a bit for him, but didn’t see him anywhere. I thought perhaps he go his sea legs and zoomed away on that F16. at any rate, there’s not much you can do for someone else on a Maliko run except give them encouragement.

Turns out Scott lost his rudder about a half mile earlier, and was knee paddling his board. About the furthest you can reliably see a kneeling person in those swells is a few hundred feet.

A little aside about GPS traces. The one above is a screen shot from Ascent, which is subscription software for GPS training. Ascent thinks I’m riding a bicycle, but that’s OK, Stand Up Paddle boards are the bicycles of the sea. The light blue trace is altitude. I’d like to ditch it, but I haven’t figured out how. The green trace is speed. Distance is the X axis and the green Y axis is in MPH, with the top number being 18 MPH. I know it’s hard to read, but I needed to fit it on the page. I’ll probably reinstall letterboxing capability just for GPS traces. I hit 16.2 MPH max speed on this run. Pretty fast for a little gumby board.

You can tell when I fell by the downward spikes that reach zero. the shorter downward spikes are checks–where I ran into the back of a swell and buried the nose. Doesn’t quite stop you, but close. Looks like I fell 19 times. That’s an improvement over the 30 times in Malko 4. Upward spikes are big swell rides. the shorter rides probably go nearly as fast, but the GPS doesn’t get enough time to record full speed. As you can see, Gumby is pretty much catching swells all the time, but it doesn’t get a lot of those great long rides. but when it does–hoo haw.

I got to the beach and everyone was there but Scott. Oops. About 15 minutes later we spotted him at the harbor mouth. good news. It took him a very long time to paddle in from there. The wind was almost straight on against him after he made the turn. When he finally made it, Randy Royse went down to the beach to help him, the rest of us hung around the cars. No swcott, no Randy. fifteen minutes passed and they finally showed up. Not only had Scott’s board lost it’s rudder, but he knocked the vent plug out when he fell in about Kanaha and the board filled with water. It was floating with about an inch of freeboard.  Randy and Scott had been all this time emptying the board out.

Shades of my first Maliko run with the Penetrator, when it got slammed in a closeout wave and buckled the bottom, incapacitating the steering mechanism and taking in water. Tough day for Scott, but he made it, and the next time will be a lot easier.

For me, I broke 2 hours, reaching the beach in 1:55 and the harbor mouth in 1:44. I stayed up on the board a lot more. My line down the coast still sucks–I did 10 miles even again. You can see on the map that I need to stay closer in at the beginning if I’m going to trim the distance to 9.5 miles. but it’s feeling a lot better.

My back is killing me, I think tomorrow is an off day. Maybe a nice sourthside run.