Nearly Screwed

Today’s lessons for paddlers:

1.    Check all parts of your equipment before you go out. Read on for an example you might not be thinking about.

2.    Help may be closer than you think.

Yesterday was warm. In Carmel, where Nick Bryson and I planned to paddle today, a warm, sunny day typically leads to fog the next. When I got up this morning, there was some threat, but it turned out to be a warm, sunny paddle.

I had just gotten my unlimited board repaired, the one I plan to use it in next weekend’s San Diego Bay 2 Bay race, so I picked it for today. Good thing. It turned out to be a very useful shake-down.

We had to wait for a break in the waves to get out. Carmel’s beach break was 4 – 6 feet. But we got out.

Then, on the way to Stillwater Cove, I started doing involuntary circles. (No, I haven’t been using any substances and I wasn’t attached to any kelp.) I tried kicking the tiller over harder and harder to correct my heading, but nothing happened. Finally, my vocabulary seriously degenerated, I got off my board and into the water, flipped the board over, and found the rudder fully rotated to one side. Good thing I didn’t take this board and do the 15-mile inaugural Davenport Downwinder today, where there’s nowhere to get to the beach for miles! So, I tried a few temporary fixes. None helped for long.

Problem was that the rudder was freely rotating. The current against the rudder created by my forward motion forced it all the way to one side, and there it stayed. The tiller was useless.

At first I thought maybe the rudder wasn’t attached to its shaft, but then I found the problem topside, where a sleeve attached to the tiller holds the rudder shaft. That sleeve has a screw that tightens the sleeve around the rudder shaft until the shaft can't rotate. The sleeve wasn’t tight enough to do its job. And an allen wrench is needed to tighten that screw.

It wasn’t looking good to finish our paddle. I had visions of constantly flipping the board over for temporary fixes good for 200 yards at best. That wasn’t going to add up to 15 miles very fast!

Nick made the suggestion we might find a Pebble Beach engineer at Stillwater Cove. The Beach and Tennis Club is there, and there’s a pier. I figured this could take a while, if it even happened at all.  I thought we’d come up empty handed. But Nick pulled a miracle and found an engineer in seconds. The guy disappeared on his golf cart (is this happening for real????) and came back shortly with a full toolkit.

I got it fixed within a minute and told the engineer he had made my day, which he certainly had. We went on, and I got to introduce Nick to Whaler’s Cove in Point Lobos State Park. The view of the park is spectacular from the water.

And no waves took me out when I returned to the beach.

 All in all, a good day! We got to paddle, and I learned something I should know about my unlimited.