Carbon Fiber Goodness

To go along with my racing kayak, I needed a racing paddle. "Wing" blade kayak paddles are pretty much the standard. Onno paddles were recommended to me by several people. So I called Pat at Onno to order a new paddle. He said it would be four weeks before he could start building it...it ended up being nine weeks before I had my paddle in hand. The guy does good work (or so I thought), but is really slow.

Then it happened. The night before my race at 9:00pm in the hotel room I noticed it....a crack in my brand new paddle. My heart literally skipped a beat. I lost more than a few hours of sleep that night worrying about weather it would hold up at all and what was I doing to do if it broke in the middle of the race. Luckily I had my old paddle as a backup and was able to tape it down to the back of the kayak just in case. But after a 100 miles, the carbon fiber paddle was still going strong. The crack may have gotten slightly bigger during the race, but not much. Now comes the fun part of fighting with Pat at Onno to fix it under warranty