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.

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.

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.

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..

3 events to go theres still plenty going on, follow the action on http://www.whitewatergp.com

Tomorrow it will be down river freestyle on Hawaii..

Pringle & Katya

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