Trip Report
Strokes and Manuevers - Kitsap Lake
Great class to help beginners start with proper strokes. The forward stroke has subcomponents: turn torso, stab the fish, rotate with hand crossing face and lower hand/arm straight (set in concrete), lift at 90 degrees, finish rotation and set up for next stroke. I LOVE IT!
- Sat, Jul 8, 2017 — Sun, Jul 9, 2017
- Strokes and Manuevers - Kitsap Lake
- Kitsap Lake
- Sea Kayaking
- Successful
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- Road suitable for all vehicles
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Only 45 minutes from Tacoma, this Lake has picnic tables, easy parking (shared with boat trailers), bathrooms (no privacy doors) but with toilet paper, and water fountain. Beach is about 25 feet wide and needs to be shared with swimmers and stand-up paddles who are also launching. Lots of grass. Lake is about 1.25 mile in length and shared with water skiers, fishing sports, and boaters with inner-tubes.
Bring a towel to avoid swimmer's itch after getting wet. Or, take a scrub shower at the end of the day.
Days on the lake were absolutely PERFECT! Couldn't have been better, actually. Charlie's approach to teaching was carefully scripted so that it could be replicated, consistent and continually improved. A huge benefit was the breakdown of the physics of the strokes, method, purpose, and tricks. As an engineer, I like to know the "why" and Charlie and Tom provided technical explanations...until our brains were getting full the end of the second day.
The strokes and the size of the group was a good pace. We had chances to try the subcomponents of each stroke before performing combinations. This is a good approach since with beginners, too much tends to bring back bad habits just to keep up.
The parking was great with enough for the weekend that included a lot of other sportsters.
I especially appreciated the video-taping of each student. I know it was quite a bit of time; however, a video is a great teacher as well. I would like to have the video available after the class, if possible.
I highly recommend this class for beginners and would recommend inserting this in-between the Basic Series: insert after the lake class and before the salt water paddles to help beginners with efficient strokes without infusing bad habits in salt water while battling wind, currents and eddies.