Tonight I had my first advanced ride with Senior Observer Gerry Gooch and all I can say is “This advanced riding shit really makes sense”.
I used the SatNav with single earphone in to get to his house and it worked really well on the tank bag thescotsman donated to me. Thanks man
Due to the fact that I have attended bike safe, free assessed ride, slow riding course, part one of the theory presentation, the many ride outs with forum members (mainly 2 of them) and several years of experience in years gone by, I managed to get a “I have only seen one other rider who’s first observed run was as good as yours…” comment from the observer. My head was so big I struggled to get it into the garage when putting the bike away. As the Scotsman will testify from Sunday’s ride out where he got a “Have you really only been riding since January?” from an ex traffic copper. This feedback lark from seasoned advanced motorcyclists feels really good.
That said, Gerry did say that there are a few areas that we can work on. Tweaking positioning at lower speeds where extreme positioning is not needed. Better planning at junctions is another. The biggest thing he said I needed to work on was looking even father ahead than I do now. Scary as that means trusting your peripheral vision more than feels natural. Basically the more you can see the faster you can safely go.
Tom, a young (made me feel old) green badge holder and a trainee observer also came along and provided some great advice. It ended up being a fun, fast ride out through various parts of the Meon valley. When I say fast, I rarely went 5% above the speed limit but when you are doing 60 down some of the narrow B roads, boy it’s fast. Limit / Vanishing points come into their own in this scenario as does the system below.
Last night at the theory presentation I had the “The System of Motorcycle Control” which was covered at BikeSafe, re-enforced. Here are the five phases of the system
Remembering this tonight really helped.
Well I am not going to go on too much more about this but all I can say is. If you are keen to turn riding your motorcycle into an art rather than a hobby or a chore, then come chat with or PM me and I will bore you to death about heading down the Advanced Riding route..
I look forward to receiveing my ride report from Gerry soon
I only managed to get the first section of the route and you can see this
here. Not sure why it didn't get the second part out of Loomies though at some point the battery ran out.
PS. Tai Pan – Sorry I couldn’t wait for you to join IAM. It has now snowballed and I’m hooked on the whole Advance Riding gig.
