Rolling with a wing paddle. Part One

One of my role models is Owen. This is a guy lucky enough to have retired and have a bit more time to paddle. He's done a bit of paddling, a lot of sailing, cycling, motorcycling, travelling and has a great attitude to life. He's developed a reliable roll despite some shoulder problems and has adopted the greenland stick for most of his cruising paddling, enjoying it's low impact on his shoulders. He still uses a wing to race and a Euro blade for surfing. He has collected a wide variety of paddlecraft, from sit on tops to home made skin on frame boats. Mirages, Valleys, racing skis, racing kayaks, they all have their place in the fleet. There are not many things that Owen has trouble rolling and he has been engaged in a project to roll every boat in the Hunter Kayak Klan. I've seen him roll completely unfamiliar boats first try. Owen can roll with his greenland stick or with a Euro blade with equal facility.

Imagine my surprise when he missed a roll with his wing paddle and wet exited in flat water. It was a surprise because I'd heard that wings were easier to roll with due to the lift from the aerofoil shaped blade and the powerful catch that this shape offers. Owen tells me that after some experimentation with his wing  he finds it is much easier to roll with the back of the blade as it planes better across the surface and doesn't dive. So it was with great interest and a little trepidation that I started playing with my new wing to explore the behaviour of the blade for rolling.

First of all, I went and sat in the pool with my new paddle it's an Epic Mid Wing. A fairly symmetrical shaped wing with only moderate twist. Sitting in the pool I swept the paddle sideways at shoulder height, planing the blade across the surface as you would a Euro paddle. Lots of splash, not a lot of lift. Next I swept the paddle on it's back face, power face up, as Owen suggested and sure enough it was more consistent but still not a lot of lift. Next I tried the sweep with the paddle power face down and kept consistently a couple of inches below the surface rather than planing on the surface. LOTS of lift, no splash. Then as I got the paddle out perpendicular to where the boat would be if I was in one, the paddle blade dived like a submarine. I had let the blade angle shift down just a little; being a wing shape it was slightly harder to judge blade angle as the leading edge is curved over. This looked to me like what had happened to Owen, with the paddle diving just when he was in the recovery phase of his roll.

With a regular Euro paddle or a traditional Greenland paddle it is common practice to reverse the sweep for a brace to lock in the roll and stabilise the boat immediately after recovery. When you try this with a wing, the aerofoiled blade stalls and does some very unpredictable things, so you need to get the roll finished with rotation to spare.
So my conclusion, was that with this particular wing to keep the powerface down as normal and keep careful control of the blade angle while sweeping just below the surface. Next step was to put it into practice in the boat.

Down at the beach, conditions were perfect, the water was warm and clear and I put on my mask so I could monitor the blade angle. So much of a successful roll, comes down to muscle memory. In a real capsize, the water will often be turbulent, aerated and possibly murky, so you won't be able to see what you're doing and you rely on everything happening by muscle memory, just like a guitarist playing a chord. They don't have to look; they know exactly where their fingers need to be. While it's good to practise without a mask to ensure that you can do the roll in real conditions, it's important to learn the roll by repeating the motion as close to perfectly as you can and a mask is invaluable for this. This allows you to develop muscle memory for the process.

So mask on, set up crunched forward as close to the deck as I can get, head to the side and rolling into the water. Allowing the boat to rotate and my buoyancy to bring it around as far as it's going to. Pushing the paddle forward and up to the surface, eyes up looking to the sky, head as close to the surface as I can get it. Rotating my upper body, sweeping out to the side of the boat and bringing my shoulders and face round to look down towards the bottom, watching the paddle and the blade angle, keeping the wing blade just below the surface. Simultaneously lifting my knee to right the boat and recovering in a slightly forward leaning posture, head coming out of the water last. Textbook sweep roll, no problem. Repeated 10 times both sides, then with the mask off to test it.

Each wing is subtly different, and I use a different model to Owen's so what works for me may not work for someone with a different paddle. Some wings are more symmetrical than others and the blades are usually twisted to some extent, again, some more than others. I certainly found it easiest to roll with the paddle just below the surface which allows water to accelerate it's flow over the upper, aerofoil shaped surface generating lift. You will notice that I'm not talking about catching water with that big blade and pulling down on the shaft to muscle up. If you're technique is good, this is not necessary. If you're pulling hard on the shaft and muscling yourself up, you will find the rolling process very tiring and you have a much greater risk of hurting yourself.