How to Phonics Monkey with Pringle & Katya

With the launch of Dagger’s new Jitsu playboat we wanted to give you some new skills to work on in your shiny new freestyle ripping machines.

Over the course of this year Katya and me will be producing monthly how to videos to help you progress your freestyle skills.

The first one here is on how to do one of our favourite moves: the Phonics Monkey.

What is it?

It’s a  360 degree vertical spin linked into a front loop.

It looks very spectacular, is one of the highest scoring moves and also one of the hardest to master.

How to do it?

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Step One: Set Up

Step One: Start up nice and high on the foam pile. Turn the boat so that it’s lined up straight to the oncoming flow. Let yourself drift down towards the seam line with a little bit of edge held on.

 

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Step Two: Initiation

Step Two: Just before you reach seam line reach across the bow with a crossbow stroke to initiate the 360 pirouette.

 

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Step Three: Looking Ahead

Step Three: As soon as you’ve initiated the crossbow pirouette, start looking ahead of the boats rotation.

 

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Step Four: Spotting Upstream & Throwing Loop

Step Four: When you’re getting nice and vertical and your nearing the end of the 360 you want to spot a marker, could be a tree or a slalom pole, anything that is directly upstream of you.

 

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Step Five: The Landing

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Step Five: Kicking your Feet Out

Step Five: When you see that marker jump up on your toes into your standard looping position & then kick your feet out straight ahead of you in the direction of that upstream marker.  The more aggressive the better at this point.

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Get some forwards strokes in to stay in the hole.

How to make sure it scores?

  • Try to start at a low angle and build up continuously to vertical. Timed correctly this will give you the biggest air and make sure the judges like it.
  • Make sure you keep the loop nice and straight at the end. (Spot your marker & Kick your feet out in front when you finish the Loop)

Things to watch out for:

  • Going vertical too soon.
  • Taking too much speed into the move (that just means you’ll go vertical too soon.)
  • Reaching out too far on the cross bow. Again this will mean you go vert too soon or hurt your shoulder.

Finally

Get out there and have a go, be patient it will probably be a gradual process mastering this move, but very satisfying when you get it.

Good Luck,

Pringle & Katya

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Lienz – European Championships Lead Up

Just back from my trip out to the Teva Games in Colorado it was time to get the van loaded and head off to Austria.

Palms Bren Orton and myself drove straight out to begin training at the site of the 2012 European Championships in Lienz. A beautiful town in the Austrian Alps with a sick play hole in the bottom of the valley surrounded by towering mountains and stunning scenery.

The hole is a really tricky powerful feature that takes time to get used to but also gives you lots of air when you do get the moves. Everyday our paddling is getting better and despite the difficulties of the feature is one of the most fun to paddle.

Aside from the paddling the area is also great for exploring the outdoors. On my rest day I decided to take a trek up the towering mountain nearest the campsite it took a while…and I didn’t quite make the last 20m to the summit but the view was amazing out over the valley with Buzzards flying over-head and black squirrels in the trees I loved it.

One of the challenges here is the fluctuating water level meaning that 1 min its perfect and 20 minutes later your on rocks. The bonus of this however has been plenty time in the Swimming pool opposite the hole to perfect our diving and some good adventures nearby…last night we drove up to 2067m of another mountain, so high in fact that we parked next to a snow mobile ;-)

Anyhow 1 more week till the comp begins, hopefully Katya will be here soon too so will report back with more updates as the event  progresses.

Pringle

Photos by Dennis Newton & Claire O’hara

 

 

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Teva Mountain Games – Freestyle Update

Last Monday evening I arrived in Vail, Colorado the site of the Teva Mountain Games to find barely any water here…I mean literally none!

With the lack of a playspot I spent the first couple of days practicing on the Homestake Creek which although very manky and rocky was actually quite good fun. There was talk of cancelling the Freestyle so I’d thought I better find something to compete in having come all this way ;-)

Creeking not really being my forte and only being able to borrow other peoples boats I was pretty scrappy the first 2 runs i did, the  last 3 i had though felt better and better, so was feeling I could do an alright run in the race.

To my relief however Clay Wright and the rest of the Jackson crew spent 8 hours dropping in plywood and all sorts to try and make a useable feature and succeeded, allowing the Freestyle event to go ahead after all.

Its very brutal and shallow still but you can do some good moves if you avoid the rocks. Considering when I got here there was only a 1cm deep little hole that looked like you might be able to spin in if you got lucky, I’d call their work a big success.

Thursday I decided not to do the Creek Race and instead stayed and paddled a bunch in the play hole, trying to decide whether to use carbon (very traumatic) or plastic.

The sound of me smashing the bottom in my Carbon GuiGui could be heard back in the hotel…Thankfully Dagger let me borrow a plastic boat to use which is a lot less stressful and actually paddles really well. As much as I enjoyed the stress free paddling of the plastic Dagger prototype I ended up going with my carbon in the end. its what i’m used to and felt most comfortable using with only a little amount of time to practice.

Friday was the day of the Kayak Freestyle Qualifiers the hole was still brutally shallow it is possible to get some sweet rides as long as you manage to keep off the rocks.

The qualifier cut the field to the top 10, with each paddler getting two 1 minute rides both of which counted. For non locals here one of the main challenges of this event is the altitude.

I’d never felt the effects of altitude before coming here but it really does make it hard to breathe. I’d get 3 or 4 moves into a run and be panting hard!

Even with the challenges of altitude and low water though, the comp gave some sick rides. I had pretty good rides, missing quite a few moves from flushing a bit to low down when I tapped the rock but got enough moves stuck in the hole to come in 4th. The only other European  in the mens Mat Dumoulin from France had such a sick smooth 1st run then an ok 2nd run to take 3rd with Stephen Wright in top spot followed by Dane in 2nd.

In the Womens Uk’s Claire O’Hara cleaned up with awesome rides with Fonix’s & Mc’Nasties and a bunch of other stuff, very cool to see her doing well over here.

Full Results from all rounds and events can be found: http://www.tevamountaingames.com/summer/athletes/results/teva-mountain-games-results.aspx

Yesterday brought semi finals in the morning and finals in the afternoon. For semis the top 10 would have looked just as legitimate the other way up, a very tough field of paddlers to get in the top 5 of.

Myself, I had a pretty good 1st ride that would have been enough but I flushed just a bit too far back on a few moves for them to score. I was either smashing the rock or landing too far back in the hole not to flush a bit. Was a bit frustrating for me but theirs always next year. I ended up in joint 8th with fellow euro Mat who also didn’t get that lucky either bit of a weird level that just didn’t seem to work for us.

However it didn’t seem to stop the others throwing some awesome rides. Stephen, Dane & Dustin were all on top form in the hole and in my eyes any one of them could have won, but as the finals came around Stephen was the most consistant at getting a good mix of hard technical moves and big air and even hit a 5 move combo (no easy accomplishment in this hole) to take the Win, 2nd was Dane, 3rd was Dustin.

In the Womens Claire had  a sick 1st ride scoring 610 (beating mine and Mat’s score in Semis!) and took the win straight away, 2nd was Haley Mills and 3rd Courtney Kerin from NZ.

Today is the 8 Ball Kayak Race where we race 4 at a time over a short distance with other paddlers paddling at you in body armour trying to stop/ destroy you, qualifiers just been and I made the cut :-) Finals later.

It’s a good time here and nice to get into competing for this season/ meet up with friends I haven’t seen for a while. Bit frustrated to not show my best but some good fire to get me training harder as we have European Champs in Lienz, Austria in just a few weeks.

I fly home tomorrow and drive straight out to Lienz so really looking forward to getting to work on my paddling there.

bye for now,

Pringle

(Photos of myself thanks to Steve Gould/ Chewy)

 

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GBR Freestyle Team Selection for 2012 Vienna Euros

Our GBR team selection to pick the team to compete at next years European champs in Vienna is a 3 competition format with the best 2 results out of the 3 counting.

This weekends event at Hpp, Nottingham was the first 2 comps of the 3. One on the Saturday in the inlet gate and one on the Sunday in the Twin waves. 3 rides best 2 count.

For me I am away for the last comp of the 3 the Hurley Rodeo so I needed to do well to secure my place.

I’m not going to go into that much detail on my runs but I managed pretty sweet rides hit a few of my combos both days (2400 on Sat, 1600 on Sunday) to take the double win and give me a guaranteed spot on the team to compete at the Euros :-)

Palm’s Bren Orton got two 2nd place finishes in the Juniors to get his place guaranteed and Palm’s Lowri Davies also made the team :-)

The main thing about the weekend was the incredibly high standard, the level of kayaking here is phenomenal. To make the mens top 10 on Saturday you needed to score something like 1200 or more!! The Juniors and the ex juniors who have just moved to senior are killing it! Its a credit to the awesome setup of events such as the Youth Freestyle series and the great freestyle spots we have allover the UK.

All summer me, Bren Orton, James Benn’s, James Weight, Ryan Liqourish & David Wild have been paddling a lot together working on our moves and trying to develop new moves or combinations of merged moves. This event our whole group put on a sick showing nailing sweet rides as well as pretty much all of our combo’s we’ve invented.

The point we wanted to make by getting our combos in a comp environment was to illustrate the need for some additions or some changes to the current scoring. For example if you merge a Lunar Orbit with a Tricky Whu with a Loop it only gets scored a Trophy 3 (200) but if you were to do them seperately you would get 380… For hole kayaking we need to encourage people to learn these moves and go for them in comps so they need to be scored much higher in order to reward the risk/ skill involved to hit them.

Anyhow I had a real fun weekend and was super proud watching the standard of kayaking in all categories here. This last 3 years the standard and depth of talent here continues to explode, its so good to see.

Here is a video Jonny Williams put up of some of the action from Saturday:-

Pringle

All the results will be up soon on GB Freestyle website for those who want to see exact scores.

Photos by:- Simon Thorne, Chris Throne & Bren Orton

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