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Aire Waves
Leeds Canoe Club Blog. We paddle... lots!
Airewaves used to be Leeds Canoe Club's magazine letting people know what the club was upto. Its quite hard work pulling together a publication letting people know what the club is doing and publishing dates in advance is always hard as things tend to change. Step forth the blog.. Push button publishing for the masses. So here is the idea a few people in the club take it in turns to write up trips and talk about things in the club.
Thursday, January 04, 2007Swimming Burns
The river Sprint is near Kendal. An excellent grade IV river with plently of interesting rapids, and a couple of unlikely swims from Paul Crouch & Curly (both paddling pyranha burns, so was it the paddler or boat at fault!). Fortunately no CATastrophe was had as they were reunited with boats & paddles, with BEARly any extra scratches on them. Near the end of the river was a weir with an excellent sufing wave, and then it was time to limb out of the boats, get changed and then consume sandwiches, coffee, hot souP AND A chocolate bar.
Comments:Alright, the intention wasn't to do the Sprint. In fact, we wanted to do the Ribble - or at least those who thought they knew what they wanted said it was the latter, and since the rest seemed to be easy... Anyway, it was right stonking in Settle and we though we'd do it - from the second attempt this year that is.
Got to the get in, got changed, and everything would be just great if it were not for a farmer in a bag of spanners (though he seemed to believe it was a vintage Landrover) who turned up with a sole purpose of TTFOing us. He was even bothered enough to stay and observe us stuffing Curly's van with boats and leaving - from a distance, though.
Anyway, we drove almost to Kendal to find the Sprint at high-ish level - in fact, some allegedly local people said later they've never seen it that high.
On the way up we were suitably impressed (I mean almost khaking ourselves) by what we've seen and even more so - by what we didn't see but could imagine - mighty falls, tight gorges, fishermen with sniper rifles and all that usual stuff.
Anyway, the first mile or so turned out to be a ditch with trees all over the place, then widening up a bit with some white stuff, all going on at around G2 for a mile or two. Then there was the S-Bends (we, the kayakers, don't suffer from excessive imagination as far as making the rapids' names up is concerned, ain't we?), a G4, maybe 4+, a warped channel with good gradient, all bigger and better than the one on the Tees. Putting my elegance of a limping rhino aside, we did fine and continued donstream full of fears of 'the falls we've seen from the road which is way bigger' (yeah, we didn't find it, by the way - so either the locals removed or it was the S-bend we've just done).
The next feature, 'the one beneath the bridge', turned out to have higher entertaining potential, as it was proven by Paul C who went into a stopper backwards (purely to cheer everybody up, of course) and then stayed in it for a while even despite the boat and paddle gaining sudden independence. I don't know how much time he spent there - enough to let One-Eyebrowed Andy get to the gorge wall (tell me he's not a Spiderman) and start expressing slight concerns.
It spat him out eventually, alive, but with a few scratches on his brand new hockey helmet (a quick remark, BTW- people were making fun of my creeking boat and creeking helmet. We've already passed the point when everybody stopped fooling around and just bought a barge. Now the same trend is with the helmets, apart from Bob who still shows some rather strange affection towards kids' pots, preferably in bright colors, explaining that 'they've got brims').
Personally, I felt brave enough to play a wimp and portage, but a brief inspection of the banks showed that the portage wasn't such a good idea, and the owner of the garden we used for paniking was already staring at us through his window, so I went for it, rolled right in the middle of it, but got through anyway - eyes wide open, strange smell from the boat, but otherwise trouble-free.
We recovered Paul's stuff a mile down the river and went on - nothing awfully remarkable until the last G4-, the Rock'n'Roll: you hit the rock and roll, as myself and Curly have proven... Or shall I say, you hit the rock, roll, find yourself stuck in a stopper, go out of it through its side (in my case) or you hit the rock AND SWIM in Curly's.
Well, that's all, folks. Good river; needs water from the skies and technical skills from the paddlers!
Good starter blogs, pity the competition doesn't start untill after the awards get posted to the blog. Nil points.Post a Comment
Ha HA HA HA haaaaa.
I think we need to allow more than one blog per river though, it would be a pity for these not be seen because you need to click on an extra button.
Andy, be a little more subtle with the animal abuse, it was supposed to be a secret code.
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