Peter’s Paddling Blog

A Sea Kayak Championship has been on my mind for more than a couple of years now. Along with different groups of people I’ve been discussing various rolling, racing and technical competitions. Now to make a long story short, last summer we finally in context of the Danish Canoe Federation settled on two different championships:

1. The Danish Marathon Sea kayak Championship.
2. The Danish Technical Sea Kayak Championship.

The point is that instead of trying to create one competition that wants to make everybody happy, we’re aiming for two different competitions for two different groups of paddlers.

Now as for the marathon competition, in recognition of our limited workforce (the sea kayak board consists of 5 volunteers) we decided not to establish a new race but rather piggyback on an existing race.

We considered various races and finally decided on Sea Challenge Fyn(SCF) as our race. SCF is a race that during 7 stages takes the participants around the island Fyn with distances ranging from 30 to 70 km.

SCF prohibits the use of ICF K1s and defines two different classes for the competition: K1-trainers (as defined by the federation) and sea kayaks(undefined). We’ve decided that the best placed danish male and female paddlers in the sea kayak class wins the danish championship.

The lack of requirements for the sea kayaks could mean a kayak like the Nelo Sea Vanquish could be racing a Valley Nordkapp. Is that a problem?
The harder I try to answer that question the more complicated the whole issue appears to me. Here’re just some of our thoughts:

1. We want to support the current development of sea racers and surfskis. These new types of kayaks means more variation to our sport and ultimately makes our sport more attractive.
2. The paddlers in sea racers are mostly dedicated racers. Even if these paddlers were forced into using more regular sea kayak, they would still win – or more likely they would stay at home.
3. One side effect of the established K1-trainer and ICF-K1 classes is that you’ll find dedicated ICF-K1 paddlers “downgrading” to the trainer class for one of two reasons. The competition might be too tough in the ICF class or there might be too few paddlers in the ICF master classes.
4. We have an obligation to consider the safety implication of our decisions. By enforcing say deck lines on “sea kayaks” we’re indirectly forcing the producers to add these to their kayaks.
5. We are fully aware of the ICF ocean racing rules draft.

I would be interested in your thoughts on this topic. Is it unfair that one can paddle a ‘sea kayak’ championship on a surfski? Should we enforce a more strict/conservative ruleset on the sea kayaks allowed in the competition?