so it's very scary and then and then it's not so scary um i think that one
when you get it right it feels natural it doesn't feel forced and the boat feels like
it just glides i guess would be what i would say so when the oar goes in the water right
the boat just moves nicely and it feels stable and once you start to get a small amount of momentum
you feel more comfortable in the boat all right so when we first were getting in the boat the
first hurdle was just getting the oar and the gate and i thought how the hell am i ever going
to row when i didn't even have the confidence to lean over the boat and put the oar in the gate
and then i got in the water and it felt pretty scary to begin with but the first exercise we did
was rocking the boat side to side using the oars and once i did that i realized that the boat was
actually a lot more stable than i thought it was um and that you had a lot of control with the oars
as long as you knew what to do with them the oars always really give you all the control of the boat
you've got to realize that the oars are your stability not the boat not your seat
once I'd done that I felt much more comfortable and then we um
then I sat there for a while and just held the blades flat and actually just slid up and down
the slide and realized that it really wasn't that unstable and that I had a lot of control and that
you could move around quite a lot in the boat as long as you had you're oars as flat in the water
and then we did some touching the boat round and just moving small little paddles and i found that
quite hard to begin with until i was told to keep the oar up at my diaphragm the one that wasn't
moving and keeping the oar up at the diaphragm kind of kept that blade kind of sitting on top
of the water nicely so i was nice and balanced and allowed me to just focus on this blade and
turning the boat around in a circle so that i was pointing in the direction i wanted to go
and then once we started rowing it felt a bit odd to begin with
learning how to feather felt odd until i was told to pretty much just let the blade do the work
for me so once you give it that just that little twist with your fingers the blade itself clicks
into the gate sits in the water the right way and then you can just focus on pulling and once
i stopped worrying so much about looking at the blade and what the blade was doing and focus more
on just looking straight ahead and feeling it it kind of came more naturally and started to feel
more normal and then slowly just went from doing it with just the arms leaning back and forward
and then using a little bit of slide and then just progressively coming further and further
and further up the slide and i mean eventually you would do something wrong the blade wouldn't go in
the water you'd feel a bit unstable but you'd realize you didn't fall in and that you could
just recover on the next stroke and it really wasn't as bad as you thought it was going to be
you want a really relaxed grip though
and just relax your fingers a bit more a really loose grip
and just a little bit of a twist with your fingertips and just push it away
You just want to try and keep that posture but remember so you're still
using your arms early we want to push first that's better and the
arms only really start to get used when your body's about vertical not that's too early
now push really hard let's really make a bike move now we're going
remember to leave the oar in the water don't try and if the boat tilts a little
bit you're still got to leave the oars in the water so you need to let your hands and
arms relax so that the blade stays in the same place regardless what the boat does