Madison Clean Lakes Festival

Today I had a great paddle and enjoyed a hard, but fun race in Madison, WI.

This even is held on Lake Monona, Madison WI. Winds were east as 10 to 20 mph, creating a nice 1 to 1.5 ft cross chop, so it made for some exciting paddling. There were a couple of surf skis, a couple of stand up board paddlers, the normal mix of racing and recreational C1 ans C2 canoes. The race had options of recreational event doing 1 loop, short course doing 2 loops and long course doing 3 loops of the 4 mile loop.

After some pre-race deliberation, the wise elected to run more stable boats, the game and foolish the skinny fast boats. I left my fast skinny kayak on the roof of my car and ran with my own beginners racing kayak, the Diamond.

The Diamond performed wonderfully, without a spray deck, in 1 to 1.5 ft seas, I hardly took a wave into the cockpit. After two hours of racing I had less than a pint of water in the kayak. Unlike a couple of racing canoes that were racing like subs, and going down almost as fast as they were going forward. The short steep waves and wind coming in from the rear quarter gave the ski paddlers a hard time, while the low volume racing canoes bounced deeply taking a lot of water.

So the Diamond has proven itself to be a very capable, dry kayak in lively conditions, and it was a blast to paddle, very stable and well behaved on all points of wind and waves.

I managed a squeak out, and I mean squeak, first place in the 12 mile race in 1hr:55m, + 2 minutes penalty time for not doing the portage, (portage? what's that?) won by 3 seconds ahead of the next boat, a racing C2.

This is a fun race, informal, no prizes, nice location, great for spectators who can see the whole event from various locations on the bike paths that follow the lakes.

When I work out the technology I'll post the GPS track of the race.