Pants on Fire, or Maybe Not

Well, I just wanted to get off my chest the whole accusation of lying thing. My friends at Progressive Sports accused me of being a liar and, saying instead of babying my boards, I was mistreating my boards. I wanted to post some pics just to make it clear how careful I am in this rocky environment. I took these picture on Wednesday, August 21, 2013. There may be a little shimmering because I just washed it.

Here's the board. Doesn't look too bad. The one hole is on the right side, not far down from the NSP logo.

Some scratches very minor scratches and paint chips. They're easy to see against the blue background, but this is basically the condition of the board across the entire bottom.

Here is the repaired hole up close. It was done by East Coast Surf Products in Larchmont, NY. This is the one I mentioned several times and was told I must have several holes.

Here is the first impact I ever had with a rock. This happened in 2011. Notice the scratches across the NSP logo? There is no repair here. BTW, this impact threw me forward, off the board. The far worse impacts to my Exocet occurred without any feedback at all to me! I just took the board out of the water, and whoops!

The last this I want to mention is that this NSP board has been in the water for three seasons. (I bought it late spring 2011.) It has gone to Florida once and Cape Cod twice. This is the kind of construction I expect from my boards, and the level of construction I asked for.

Great Weekend in Lake Placid

Kirsten, my lovely and athletic wife, wanted to do a two-mile cable swim in Mirror Lake in Lake Placid. She did it last year and won her age group, and now she wanted to repeat the event. Instead of her going alone, we went together, leaving our three lovely, beautiful, quiet, intelligent, extremely well-behaved monsters children with her father in Delmar whilst the two of us headed for the Adirondacks. It was like we were a couple again.

We stayed in a hotel just two minute's walk from her race. This was the view from off our hotel balcony:

This is Mirror Lake, not Lake Placid.

I paddled around Mirror Lake while Kirsten did a practice swim. It was a beautiful lake with lots of people on paddling canoes, kayaks, and a few SUPs. Most people were fumbling with basic paddling technique, like which direction to hold the paddle, but it was nice to see some many.

The next morning before Kirsten's race, the view was spectacular:

Pretty amazing fog, right? Kirsten said that's Whiteface Mountain in the distance. In the other direction was Mount Marcy, the tallest mountain in New York, as if you didn't know.

Then we headed off to Kirsten's race. Check in was at 8 AM. The cable itself was 1/4 mile long, so she would have to swim four laps around it. There were two heats, the first for the faster swimmers and the second for those who were swimming more recreationally. Kirsten (of course) was in the first. However, this year the race was a national championship, so the competition would be a lot more fierce.

Got her number.

Getting nervous and feeling cold.

Feeling less cold.

Lining up to go in.

Getting her number reapplied because she wore a huge blue parka that wore off her number.

Heading in.

This is what the swimmers look like. No, I can't find Kirsten in this shot either. Let's just say, open water swimming isn't the best spectator sport.

Emerging at the end. Kirsten is the first woman in this shot.

Man, she looks tired.

Yes, she does need help up.

How do you think you'd look if you just swam two miles?

Every swimmer should recover from their race with a warm fleece, warm tea, and an octopus hat.

Fourth place in her age group!

That afternoon we goofed off on Mirror lake on our paddleboards.

I am attempting to stand on the tail of my NSP 11'.

I am falling off the tail of my NSP 11'.. This is the best picture ever taken of me standup paddling.

Kirsten doing a warrior-woman yoga pose.

Kirsten paddles an older Amundsen 11'3" and super-heavy adjustable Mistral paddle. Perhaps, one day, she'll get a paddle just for her, one that is more like a SUP paddle and less like an 18th century oar.

Look at me!

This is a loon. There were quite a few of them. I thought they were shy, reclusive birds, but these guys just swam around us.

Aww, ain't we cute?

A guy paddling with his dog. The dog is wearing a PFD.

We had a great vacation. It was nice to be just a couple for a weekend instead of a mommy and daddy. It was also great to just goof off. I think I fell more times in one session than the last year on the river, and I never laughed so much.

Board Review: NSP 12' Cruiser

My friend Jerry Patterson called me the other day. He owns the only local SUP business in the mid-Hudson River area called Standup Motion (http://www.standupmotion.net) and does a good business giving SUP lessons as well as renting boards and selling board. He asked me if I wanted to do some board reviews for this blog, which sounded like a lot of fun. I met him at Oceloa Lake in Jefferson Valley where he's leased a put-in. There he had the new NSP 12' Touring SUP in blue ready for me to check out.

I was a little skeptical about pure touring SUPs. A twelve-footer is a board clearly designed to not race. It could technically fit in the 12'6" class, but it would be at a disadvantage without those extra six inches. Not that I race, but it seems like NSP was making a deliberate statement with the length of this board.

Let's start with the NSP blurb: “The 12'0 Cruiser is new for 2013. It is designed as the board that can do it all. Stable, easy to use, great for fishing, training, family and fun! The new cruiser was designed with the perfect width and volume to get you started and off and cruising quickly on flat water or the ocean. Last years 12'0 was very popular with hire centers and the new design takes the usability to the next level.”

My first impressions were that the board is very wide, and it is at over 33". The fin is also a vertical, non-surf-style fin. I'm told this fins of this style creates more drag than a more swept-back shape, but I've yet to really test that. It's also very flat with a little rocker in the nose.

The nose has more of a ship-style point than my Exocet Marlin 14, which is more kayak shaped.

Looking at the deck, it's very clear this board is designed for cruising. It's wide in the front for extra stability. There are also fourteen tie-downs in the front! (Count them.) I love a board with tie-downs. They give you that extra flexibility when cruising. You can put all sorts of things on them like rigging, or a net, or a deck bag. NSP seems to understand that. The one thing missing was a threaded Go-Pro mount. There is a tie-down where the mount should be, but it's clearly for rigging or maybe the forward mounting of a leash.

Time to get the board in the water. I lifted it by the handle, which is the new style with recesses into the board. It was the first time I tried it and I never wanted to go back. Wow, you get such a better grip with it! I remembered all those time shlepping my NSP 11' surfboard up and down the beach by the handle, my fingers cramping painfully. This little change in the handle would have made all the difference. The 12' Cruiser is also very light. The website says it's fourteen pounds, which seems a bit light, but it was definitely easy to carry.

Time to paddle this puppy. I first played with it in the water. The board was very stable. The extra width meant I had to bring the paddle out a little further than I was used to, but I got used to it quickly. It tracked well, which perhaps could be improved upon with a different fin. It turned easily with sweep and cross-bow turns. The relatively short length and extra width made it an easy board to pivot-turn.

Not all of my pivot turns are successful!

After playing around for a while, I took the board on a GPS run around lovely Lake Oceola. I used MotionX-GPS on my iPhone 4S in a waterproof pouch. I kept the phone in the waist bag with inflatable PFD. The water was flat, almost glassy and there was no wind. The water was fresh. Results:

Name:		Track 015
Date:		Jul 18, 2013 7:19 pm
Map: (valid until Jan 15, 2014)		View on Map
Distance:		0.87 miles
Elapsed Time:		11:28.0
Avg Speed:		4.5 mph
Max Speed:		11.4 mph
Avg Pace:		13' 11" per mile
Min Altitude:		411 ft
Max Altitude:		413 ft
Start Time:		2013-07-18T23:19:58Z
Start Location:
	Latitude:	41º 20' 05" N
	Longitude:	73º 47' 55" W
End Location:
	Latitude:	41º 20' 05" N
	Longitude:	73º 47' 56" W

4.5 mph is a pretty respectable speed for this board, especially on fresh water. Fresh water is a little slower than salt because it floats the board less, so more of the board is exposed to the water creating more drag. I'm not sure where that 11.4 mph reading comes from. It doesn't show up on the stats for the run, so it may be an artifact or I may have gone that speed very briefly as I pushed myself onto it. Either way, it probably isn't enough to skew the results more than a tiny bit.

One of the neat surprises was the lovely bow wave the board made. When I got it up to speed, maybe 3.5 mph, the water would curl up past the nose in a pretty little arc. At faster speeds the water would get higher than the board and trickle onto the face. This was a little distracting — I ended up pushing my speed just to see how high I could get the bow wave to go. I don't know if this was intentional or not, but I liked it.

After the timed run I paddled the board in a few more casual laps around the lake, chatting with Jerry and Ivan, another SUP buddy. That was even more fun than the timed run. this board seemed to like being paddled casually. It was great platform to just enjoy being on the water. My guess too was that this was a board more at home in flatwater conditions. It might get tossed around a little bit in chop because of the lack of rocker, but the target paddler for this board probably would be going out in conditions like that, as opposed to crazier paddlers like, say, me.

By the end of the evening I have to say I was sold on this board. Who needs to race, or surf? If you just want a board just for flat water, this NSP 12' Cruiser seemed like the perfect platform. A bigger person might find it a bit small, and even tended to sink the nose when I stood forward of the handle while paddling, but for people under 200 pounds, this is a great choice. The light weight is a plus for anyone with not a lot of upper-arm strength, although spending a lot of time on a SUP tends to fix that. It's quick and easy to stand on.

Is this the ultimate SUP? No, but it's an excellent SUP, well suited for touring, paddling, and seeing the scenery. For the person who just wants a flatwater SUP to do all these things and isn't concerned with racing or top-end performance, what's not to like?