Paddle Round The Pier – Brighton
Posted on July 19, 2013 - Filed Under Stand Up Paddling, Surftech Boards | By Surf Commission
Race Report
Driving to Brighton on one of the hottest days of the year and leaving the best surf we’ve had in Cornwall for a while wasn’t the easiest thing to do last weekend.
Paddle around the Pier on paper is one of the biggest races in the UK. Being there for the first time this year, I’m not so sure. Though it was an honour to be asked to be in the dream team with two of the UK’s best paddlers, Ryan James and Pete Holiday.
The race format was to race in teams of three to work together in order to get your team across the line first over a 14mile course. The course was to paddle parallel to the beach up and down the coast and every few miles we had to come into the beach to a checkpoint to collect a wristband.
From the start I lead out team ZRE and a long train was formed immediately. We headed up the coast with team Fanatic drafting us. As we went into the first transition to collect the wrist band I struggled to get mine on my wrist and lost lots of ground, coming out last of the group after going in first. However this kind of worked in our teams favour as I had to work really hard to get back with Ryan and Pete and this split team Fanatic up and created a gap for us to get some clear water. Rotating the lead between ourselves we managed to open up the gap to 60metres by about half way.
After getting over the shock of finding out we actually had two laps to do and not just one we knuckled down on the second lap and extended our lead further.
For the last transition we had to paddle around the new pier where we were met with an army of jet skis doing donuts around us and making the water really choppy. After standing up for the best part of 3 hours on a SUP we could have done without that!
Overall it was a good win for the team and it was great to paddle with Pete and Ryan for a change and not against them.
Ollie Shilston – Surftech Team Rider
Comments
Trackback URL for this post: http://www.surfcom.co.uk/blogs/2013/07/paddle-round-the-pier-brighton/trackback/
Leave a Reply