Crack! Part 2

Last month I wrote about whip practice in the park. A month later, post car accident and all sorts of excitement we went back. I’ve now got enough muscle in my right arm that I can crack for a much longer time before I get sore. The downside is that I can now crack long enough to give myself blisters. My skin tends not to toughen up, so I put in an order for golf gloves as some of the other participants suggested. Also, my strength is greater than my control over the lash, and my arm hasn’t learned how little force I need to get a decent bang out of the whip. The upshot:

The welts faded a bunch before I got pix.  From my point of view, some of them hurt enough to give me pause, though that was less the pain than the buzz of endorphins making me dizzy.  In any case, no whip welt on the planet can hurt as much as a migraine, and I’ve never got an endorphin rush from one of those.

I still have work to do before the signal whip is all the way broke in, and I’m already thinking of picking up an inexpensive 6′ 8-plait bull for a different feel and–this is important–louder noises.  The folks using 12′ and longer whips got some really nice echoes coming back from the water.