How to Be Smooth

According to wikiHow, to be smooth with the ladies you need to be playful, stay effortlessly in control of the situation, keep your reactions low-key, casually initiate affection, and be funny. I googled “How to be smooth” in hopes of finding a funny opening, but some of those are surprisingly applicable to kayaking. An essential piece of being effortlessly in control of the situation in kayaking is to keep reactions low key. If you over react to every boil or rock on the river you’re going to lose a lot of energy to correcting your corrections. 

In my personal opinion, the biggest key to being smooth is learning to slow it down. Slowing down the rapid in actuality by catching eddies to breathe and reset or slowing down rapids mentally. Eddies give you a chance to do the rapid at your own pace rather than trying to charge everything. Eddy hopping can quickly break big rapids into manageable sections so you can style each part individually. When given the option of scouting, I make an effort to picture each sequential move in my head. It’s important not to only visualize the crux move but to piece the entrance, crux, and outflow all together. Last week I got caught up with a few crux moves then pitoned my brains out because I forgot the importance of the seal launch into the rapid. If you can successfully picture yourself dealing with each feature of the rapid then it slows down mentally during the actual action. You’re then way less likely to get lost in the white froth or mess up the easy parts. My most frustrating moments are when I mess up the crux because I wasn’t paying attention in the approach. I’m smoothest when I’ve got the mental map to follow. Good luck greasing it out there!