Although I haven’t blogged about kayaking since mid-August, I’ve managed to get a day on the lake at Craigavon, a run down on the Bann once and in the last 4 weeks 3 runs down the Blackwater, Benburb. Today’s Blackwater session was pretty cold – verging on icecream-head weather in fact! I was quite surprised that the water levels were as high as they were seeing as it didn’t rain much in Belfast at least this week. The ‘Steps’ were looking rather tricky so the 8 of us decided to stay clear. A couple of the guys could have run them safely enough but it definitely wasn’t for everyone, and I was quite happy to jump on a bit further down. We spent a bit of time at the ‘V’ and ran it a number of times which was good craic, it was pretty bouncy with the higher water. Quite a few of the features were a little flushed out but I probably had my best attempts at surfing down at the bottom wave. It felt good that I was beginning to get a feel for what it can be like on a wave but to be honest I still find it frustrating that it’s taking me so long to get to grips with the play side of things. I guess in a perfect world, you would have the time to go boating every day of the week and you would get the benefit of consistent practice to make significant improvement. However I’m feeling more confident about my roll after the last 3 sessions which is good as it had kind of gone ‘off’ during the summer. Probably the most helpful thing for me is trying to visualise the movements I want to make when I roll. So during the week when I’m not kayaking I try to mentally go through the motions of the roll – paddle out of the water, flex wrists, engage right knee against the kayak knee braces to get the hip flick working, sweep paddle round to the right and look back. I’m at the stage where I’m having to get my brain really in gear, especially if I want to come up with a more forward and better posture instead of leaning back too much to get myself up. But hopefully the more I work at it the more natural it will become and it won’t go ‘off’ again!