roaring, gigantic ww....part deux

[rick stoehrer]

yesterday was the release of the millers river. for those of you unfamiliar with arcane massachusetts places, it's over by royalston, baldwinville and athol....nope, i'd never heard of 'em either. but they are really in massachusetts - tucked away off of 495.

we got to the river and set up our shuttle for the 7 mile run....as the other fella's shuttled cars, i stood around and watched the folks bring their boats dow, get set up and greet eachother after a looooong winter.

kayaks, sure, this i can understand....but there were folks taking canoes down this thing....pretty cool to see a short canoe, all decked out with the massive float bags with a minicel saddle and then the knee braces all rigged out....never saw anything like that before.

and so we eventually launched and it was amazing fun....running down the icy cold river on a warm sun-shiney day.

cutting into and out of eddies, trying to catch standing waves (with mixed success) and just bopping around, grinning as the river jusgt flowed on.

lots of thanks to the other fella's for keeping me out of too much trouble!

[Guest guest]

Rick...

You're not going to put ''Black Betty'' aside for whitewater ..are you? You need a ww boat now..and you can now see the difference between ''old school'' paddling like Jeff and I do in longer ww boats to these tiny play boats. I think river running, as in the skills of a slalom race, is a lost art to the people who've come into ww in the past 10 years and its that aspect of ww that I love and also transfers to sea kayaking more directly in skills for rough water and rock gardens. If I was a sea kayaker about to buy a new ww boat for river running and surf..I'd get a Prijon Athlete, a new boat in ''old school'' tradition.

[rick stoehrer]

betty is a distant second to janis...but still far above the rest of the things in my heart and mind. i will not be putting her aside.

that said, the WW is a blast and yup, i am more interested in the long WW boats than the cartwheeling, whacky gymnastics of playboats. i can see what you mean when you say those WW long boat skills transfer over...picking the line, moving in and out of eddies and surfing.

the last 2 weekends have been a blast....but next weekend i return to the salty world from whence i came....hopefully i'll find a little surf to play in....or i'll end up doing miles....either way, the salt's on my face and i'll be happy!

i'll check out that boat you're talking about. good luck next weekend with your next "pupil"

[markstephens]

OK, not to be outdone, a bunch of NSPN sea-boaters (Paula Reigel. Gerry Smith, Mike Hirsch, myself) ran a couple Class II's this past weekend as students in the NH AMC's Whitewater School. (A couple other paddlers that know their way around salt water, Sing and Philip Werner, were instructors in the course.) The four of us were all newbies to river-running/playboating, but I'd have to say we decently upheld the honor of sea kayakers trying out WW.

Saturday we did a Class II section of the Contoocook - better known as the "Took". The morning was devoted to practice at ferrying, eddying out, peelouts, surfing. I asked my instructor to help me learn to do some playboat moves, but alas, my 9 foot-plus Necky Rip isn't really made for this. We also got some rolling practice in fast-moving, ice-cold water too, if we wanted it. I even hand-rolled the Rip (in a quiet eddy, mind). That seemed to make a good impression.

After lunch we ran a section of the river, which was down to 700-800 cfs, kinda low for April. I was playing every feature I could find along the way, bouncing off rocks all over the river. A couple flips, but rolled up no problem. Then I went over in a shallow section. When I started bumping my head along the bottom, that kind of took me out of my rhythm for my roll. Disconcerting, shall we say? Hadn't had that experience, per se, in my sea boating or kayak surfing experiences. After a couple klonks on da head, I thought, screw the paddle, I'll just push myself up off the bottom. Do it all the time in surf. Only here the topography is not so uniform, so as soon as I reach down for the bottom, it's not there. I'm moving downstream and what is just below my head keeps changing, obviously. I watch the gravel and boulders sliding beneath (above?) my eyes in the clear cold water and decide to go back to the paddle. Then my shoulders and head are smacking into stuff again and I'm running out of air.

I swim.

I lose my paddle. (How did that happen?)

I keep the boat and grab my water bottle as it floats out in front of me. My instructor manages to tow me into an eddy just above the next set of rapids. Well, whatever cockiness I felt about impressing folks with the hand roll in the morning is pretty much knocked out of me now, along with most of my wind. The rest of the run was sloppy. I got pinned on a couple rocks. I missed some playspots. I was just tired. My instructor said I seemed to have lost my edge after that swim.

Well, splitting a whole bottle of Single Malt Scotch with Mike later that night, after drinking Gerry's six-pack with brandy chaser earlier and capping it off with a Ruby Port nightcap at around 1AM wasn't going to do much for improving my edge for Sunday's run. (Paula made some comment about the Angelsey tradition of drinking all night and paddling knackered the next day?) Sunday we ran a four mile stretch of the Sugar River in Newport, NH. Again, water levels were kind of low and the river was bony and a little boring, but we had the Class II+/III rapid known as Sweet Tooth to jazz things up. Running it was no big deal, but the hydraulics at the bottom gave me my best shot at squirting with the Rip. I managed to get a couple feet of air on some stern squirts by backing into the powerful overfalls blasting through the drop.

http://www.mvpclub.org/images/Thumbnails/April05/Kevin.jpg

Sweet Tooth on the Sugar

Suffice to say, I am hooked. Looking for my next stoke maybe as early as next weekend.

[paulariegel]

The AMC/MVP class was definitely fun - the MVPers were a great bunch of folks. They love to paddle, eat alot of good food and drink beer... hmmmm... sounds familiar.

Skills learned for sea kayaking: low brace turn, duffeks, bracing, rolling, and edging the boat all came in handy. Especially the rolling. That's a key skill most WW paddlers learn quickly as fellow paddlers get tried of fishing them out of the river. It came in handy when I hit a rock and flipped. What amazed me was how the WW paddlers could read the river. What looked like a swirling mass of water to me was things like smilies, frownies, downstream/upstream v's, holes, etc. And surfing isn't just an ocean sport!

Oooooyyyyyaaa, I'm hooked.

[Guest guest]

Gauley, WV....Ocoee,TN

here's the Gauley...Pillow Rock Rapid my favorite

http://www.americanwhitewater.org/photos/archive/1389.mpg

Rick C, Suz and Paul and I took a shot at the Piscat on Sat., very low but more friendly that way.. Rick was looking good in his little boat on his first at WW. There were lots of rolls and a few swims too ;o)!!

[markstephens]

Maybe we should ask Sean to set up a Whitewater/Surfing Forum (or Conference, I guess it's called here) on the message board so the part-time short boaters have a place to post, hook up, do show and go's and trip reports?

Other sites to bookmark if you haven't already:

NNESurfkayakers: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NNEsurfsession/

Merrimack Valley Paddlers: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Merrimack-Valley-Paddlers/

Northeast Paddlers Message Board: http://www.npmb.com/cms2/forum.php