On the way back to Germany to the site of the 2011 World Champs in Plattling now but here’s a little wrap up of my trip to compete in my first Teva Games in Vail, Colorado.
The first kayak event that was held was the Steep Creek Championship to be held on the Homestake Creek. Anne wrote quite a but about that already on the post below but here’s my personal little take on it.
Its a pretty beautiful area with mountains all around and a very different landscape to anywhere I’ve been before!
I arrived the day before the event started so got to take a few practice runs down. The creek is really rocky & bony but pretty fun to paddle. My main issue was getting the line on the last drop, Leap of Faith. I had two nice lines down it and 2 bad ones in practice. The other thing I noticed was that due to the alltiude here (10,000 feet) you get tired really quickly,, pretty crazy.
In the race the field cut to 22 after the first run with the remaining competitiors getting a second run to sort out the final results. I went pretty hard in the beginning and had quite good lines on the upper section although did get caught up on a few rocks and lost some time there, but i was quite happy anyways until i reached the last drop and screwed up my line. Got backlooped in the drop then stuck up against the wall upside down, took me a good 10 seconds to get back up and get to the finish….
Not the best run for sure, I finished up in 33rd, think i have a quite a bit to learn in creek racing. Mike Dawson were pretty incredible though getting great smooth lines and incredibly managed to tie for top spot down to the hundredth of a second!!!
The results were:-
1st:- Mike Dawson & Honza Lasko
3rd:- Jakub Nemec
Ladies:-
1st:- Adriene Levknect
2nd:-Nikki Kelly
3rd:-Martina Wegman
and Palm’s Anne Hubner in 4th
The next event was the Freestyle Kayak held in the hole at International Bridge.
The feature was good but a little shallow and tricky to set up.
In the qualifying round the field cut to the top 15. I had pretty good rides, did miss a couple moves but was pretty happy wit how it went finishing up in 4th position. Stephen Wright took 1st spot with some huge Loops and Godzilla’s.
The following day were the semi’s in the morning and finals in the evening.
In the semi’s you need to make the top 5 to get in the finals. I felt pretty good, dropping into my run. Had a really good start getting my entry move, both Mc’nasties, both Fonix’s and then went to go do Loops and Godzillas but couldn’t get the pop for it. Still was pretty sure I’d done plenty to make finals so in my second run, i stupidly took it pretty easy to save energy for later.
Results came out and i was sitting down in 8th, in my mind from scoring the video I’ve seen of my ride i came in 3rd… But judging is done in real time, without the benefit of video so mistakes do happen time to time, so just learn my lesson to never take it easy in a ride and move on to my next target, Worlds!
For those that want to check out the 60 second ride judges gave me 590 when it should have been scored 750 at least see:- https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=10150200452045949&oid=319949401906&comments
Finals were really well fought out however with some great kayaking getting thrown down. First was Dustin Urban with some really nice smooth paddling to beat out Ej who got 2nd with Dane in 3rd.
Womens were 1st Emily Jackson, 2nd Ruth Ebens and 3rd Hayley Mills.
Then the last event was the 8 Ball Kayak which is basically a head to head 6 at a time race down the easy stretch above the freestyle hole to under the bridge with one little twist. The 8ballers, a bunch of kayakers, rafters & SUP’ers whose job it is to take out the racers. i decided not to take part in this one with Worlds being so close, i didn’t want to get hurt but it looked awesome, super carnage!
1st was Mike Dawson, 2nd brendan Bayly and 3rd David Fussili.
Womens 1st was Nicole Mansfield, 2nd Louise Urwin and 3rd Emily Jackson.
Was a really cool competition for sure but now its on to Plattling to get ready for Worlds.
Me & Katya are now half way through the Whitewater grand prix event in Canada.
The event comprises of 3 freestyle and 3 creek competitions on huge rapids and waves to determine the overall winner. We’ve now completed the first 3 and have 3 more to go.
Stage 1:- Big Trick Contest – Gladiator Wave
We did expect some big water&waves here in Canada, but the first event held on the Gladiator wave on the Ottawa river showed it can be even bigger. Here in Canada people enjoy huge tricky waves in the middle of the rapid, it also must have a huge hole behind for extra excitement.
You paddle out and down through the top half of the rapid then onto the wave do your best to hold on and throw a move then paddle as hards as you can to avoid the ledge hole. Most paddlers took quite a few attempts at the wave before they mustered up the courage to catch it and with such a big, surgy wave to surf getting a move was never easy. I managed to get a big Air screw as my best move that placed me 11th. Ben Marr (1st), Dane Jackson (2nd) & Rush Sturges (3rd) had the best moves of the day for sure.
Girls event was about who manage to surf the wave and longest surf wins. Lou Urwin 1st, Emily Jackson 2nd, Katya took 3rd, was very glad she did surf it at all, as even after one day not every competitor managed.
Stage 2:- Big Water Boatercross – Gauntlet on the Rouge river
Next up we headed to the Rouge river for the big water boatercross, big waves and big water awaited us but it was no where near as intense as Gladiator had been so they decided to do a mass start boatercross to cut the bottom 6 then 4 at a time head to heads to decide the rest.
The mass start was full on with 22 paddlers trying to race together down through the chaos, I had a great start reaching the first main rapid in 2nd position but that all went a bit wrong as i tried to dodge around Casper and ended up in the main hole, i never really made it back up after that so got cut out of the future rounds with the other bottom 6 paddlers. Top 3 was Nick Troutman 1st, Bryan Kirk 2nd and Anton Immler 3rd.
Ladies had not as mass start, it was only four of them, but they made it to the finish with some carnage and one swim. Katya had two runs with a good line, ended up on 2nd position.
Stage 3:- Steep creek time trial – Petite Bostonnais
Third up was a creek race time trial on the Petite Bostonnais 2 runs best 1 counts. On the drive up there was water & flooded out areas everywhere we passed through so it wasn’t a suprise to get there to find way too high flows to paddle safely but luckily for the actual competition day they managed to get the dam to reduce the flow for the event with just enough time to scout and do one practice run before the race.
The run was the hardest creek I’ve ever paddled never mind race. At the top was a double drop waterfall followed by a tricky third drop and then an absolutely massive rocky slide maybe 250m long with a big hole near the bottom.
My practice went well, apart from missing my boof on a top drop, and i really felt there were many opportunities to hurt yourself on a slide, where I felt no control and couldn’t see very much at all except from whitewater. So I wasn’t too sure about running it again in the race with already quite a few swims by some top creekers on their practice run but then i decided to at least do one run and take my chances.
I was fourth to go and on the radio as the paddlers before me set off i heard that all 3 had swam, pretty unnerving for sure but i felt good as I set off I didn’t paddle like a race at all. I took it slow got my boofs and only really started to speed up towards the end, got really good lines down all the drops/ slides but wasn’t super fast on the flats. I was the first to make it down to the finish line and was super fired up! I decided not to go for a second run being happy enough with my first. I finished up 14th in the race with the top 3 being, 1st Even Garcia, 2nd Dane Jackson & 3rd Ben Marr.
In total their were 12 swimmers during the race so I was pretty happy to have made it down fine especially since I’m not really a creeker, you know the section is full on when solid creek paddlers like Tyler Curtis, Joel Kolwalski, Nick Troutman and Aniol Serrasolses end up swimming!
Also we get to surf some waves in between competition stages. We went to the White Dog wave on a Rouge river in another day, it was the best spot here in Canada so far for freestyle as we know it in Europe – with eddy, no hassle to get on, but still big, green and fast
We keep been blown away by the scale of the rivers here, we’ve never seen so much water and rivers in an area!
The organizers keep bringing us to these amazing full on locations and putting us up in nice hotels and cabins, they even feed us sometimes it really is amazing how their pulling off the event with all those helicopters flying around..
We had such a great time in Galicia and Portugal, it was pretty hard to leave but as we got to the beginning of April came around we set off on the drive to Plattling in Germany.
This spot is where the World Championships will be held later in the year. Its a river wide weir with the best parts being the hole on the river left and two wavey sections in the middle and river right side. The level when we first arrived was super low and the weather baltic! But luckily for us that night the rains came in and brought the level up to ideal conditions for the holey section.
Having spent our time in Galicia enjoying the rivers & lifestyle aspect of kayaking along with surfing on the Frieira dam wave it was time to get into a more serious training mode in Plattling to get into shape to give the World Champs our best shot!
Its a good hole for sure but certainly not as easy as people generally think but it does give up some very good rides when you put the work into learnt the sweet spots. At higher levels you can get some ridiculous loops and lower levels you need to be careful to avoid the rocks but you can get really good rides still if your careful.
After 3 weeks paddling here together Katya flew back to Russia to compete in her team selections & apply for her Canadian visa in order to go to the Whitewater Grand Prix in Canada in May. This left me kind of alone living in the Van just paddling as much as I can until we fly out to Canada at the end of the month.
Thankfully their are a few others spending their time living in the carpark here and life in the van is one of my favourite aspects to the kayaking lifestyle. Looking in from the outside, being in a van all the time might seem a bit tough but in reality I love it, Kayak everyday, wake up next to the river, move on to the next spot without any hassle i really wouldn’t change anything.
I’ll be paddling here until the end of the month when both me & Katya fly out to Canada for the Whitewater Grand Prix event. Can’t wait
Features footage from our drive from the Uk to Galicia, time on the Frieira Dam Wave on the Spain/ Portugal border and then the footage we have from our weeks creeking in Portugal.
In under-two months time Katya and myself will be heading to the Whitewater Grand Prix in Canada. An all around event that will feature 3 Creeking competitions and 3 Freestyle to crown the ultimate all around Whitewater Champion on some of the biggest whitewater and waves in the world.
To prepare for this we travelled to the Galicia region of Spain/ Portugal and so far have been spending time honing our wave skills on the Dam wave in Frieira and in the Ocean Surf that I wrote about in my last update.
This last week we set about getting the feel of being in creekboats again as we joined up with Aniol Serrasolses from Spain and a bunch of super friendly Portugese Kayakers who’ve been showing us around some beautiful rivers in the area.
The rivers we ran down were the Alto Tea, Cascada de Umia, Rio Bec/ Tameda, some really low Rocky ditch & the Rio Castro Laboreiro.
The rivers for me were all incredibly beautiful with a very wild setting and super clean clear water. I really enjoyed the beauty of the areas we past through! In my boat I felt very rusty at first going from a 7kg carbon playboat to a 17kg plastic river boat is a bit of a shock at first but the boats (Mamba & Axiom) handled great once we got the feel for them.
The Mamba was just so forgiving and easy to paddle, it feels like it just always goes the best possible route through a rapid even when you miss your stroke or something and the Axiom is just so versatile, I used it in big surf last week and it was a blast and then on some technical creeks and big water runs here and it handled perfectly and is incredibly fast. Its going to be hard to choose which to use for Canada…
I’ll let the photos do most of the talking but the highlight for me was definitely the big Slide “Cascada de Umia”. Aniol had shown us some photos on the internet, and mentioned it had probabl never been ran. It looked very spectacular so on the second day myself, Katya and Aniol drove to check it out on our way down south to Portugal.
We arrived to find it had some water in it and looked just as it did in the photos. It had a few sketchy bits on it that I was a bit unsure about it but Aniol seemed confidant on his line so he walked up to the top and nailed a perfect, smooth line down the whole drop and slide to take the First Descent (as far as we know anyway).
Having seen Aniol style it I decided on my line and went for it! It went better than I imagined and it was such a great feeling coming through the spray on the kicker into the pool below! Really sick slide in an awesome setting.
One of the other really spectacular rivers we did was the Portugese classic the Rio Castro Laboreiro. We decided to run down the upper and middle section back to back. The upper section had some really great rapids, drops and slides and the lower 3 fantastic waterfalls (6m, 10m & 12m) and one giant portage. The day was a bit of an adventure with some big beatings and a couple swims, 2 split kayaks, one drowned camera, and an epic portage that meant a very late finish to the day.
All in all it was a fantastic weeks paddling, with some really great friendly kayakers that took us down some brilliant rivers that we’d have never found without them. So a big thank you to Aniol Serrasolses, Emilio, Pablo, Ramico, Joao, Luis, Antonio and the whole Portugese crew who offered us great hospitality and a really enjoyable week!
Check out the Photos & Flickr Slide show below to get a better look at our adventures.
We left the UK two weeks ago to head out on our European migration and after a leisurely 5 day drive we arrived in Frieira next to the Rio Mino on the Spain/ Portugal border.
So far we’ve been spending most of our time at the wave below the Dam in Frieira.
It works best in the morning and ussualy drops off in the afternoon although the dam releases have been a little unpredictable so far.
The wave at the right level is probably one of the best in Europe, and a reasonable hole at lower flows. The only downsides is that you need to catch it from above which means after each ride is a tough walk back up over jagged rocks and through thorny gorse bushes to get back in, but luckily the wave really makes up for the hard walk back to the top.
The area of Galicia we’ve been in so far has been pretty warm with beautiful lush scenary all around us, a really great place to kayak.
This weekend just gone we drove to the Portugese coast to head out in our brand new as yet un-used Axiom in some very violent hefty storm surf. The boat handled great in the rough conditions and I had a very short session getting battered around before it got too big and I retreated back to the beach.
Check the photo gallery below to see more of what we’ve been upto…
