Inside Paddling’s Most Unusual World Championship

Back in November, Andy Grizzell posted a Facebook video that set off a stir amongst squirt boaters. The clip shows thousands of cubic feet per second wrapping around a boulder on the Salmon River near Riggins, Idaho, colliding into frothing whitewater before folding into a deep, unsettled eddyline or seam. Grizzell, a South Carolina paddler and longtime squirt boater, suggested it might be the sink spot for the 17th annual Mystery Worlds, scheduled for July 4, 2026.

The comments piled up fast, ranging from #sinkandgetdestroyed to jokes about it being “a perfect place to do less.”

Inside paddling’s most unusual world championship

Grizzell won the 2025 Mystery Worlds, an annual competition of paddling’s most niche sub-discipline, where 10 to 40 paddlers converge on a single sink spot to compete in the sport’s ultimate experience: the mystery move.

A mystery move begins when a paddler dives their squirt boat into a seam where the current pushes downward, forcing both boat and body fully underwater. Staying down for 20, 30, 40 seconds or more depends on the squirt boater’s ability to hold position before the boat’s minimal volume pushes them back to the surface.

Squirt boats mold tightly around a paddler’s legs and hips, reducing volume as they taper to points on both ends, more like wings than hulls.

“You can’t get more in the water,” said multi–Mystery Worlds winner and downtime record-holder (64 seconds) Jeremy Pou. “It’s essentially swimming in a piece of fiberglass.”

From shore, metal flakes of gold, green, red and blue burst as sunlight refracts through the water. The boats flash and meander through the current like rainbow sturgeon, their colors scattering across the surface. From above, you have no idea how deep a boater is diving.

“Sixteen feet hurts,” Pou said, recalling the 2018 Worlds on Oregon’s Santiam River. At depth, the river’s weight pops ears and squeezes chests. Boats compress against knees, shins and, I’ve heard, testicles. But once below the whirlpools, the water quiets, and the boat slips into a kind of fishbowl.

Competition at Mystery Worlds is based on total time underwater across five rides. Sometimes four rides. Sometimes competitors alternate charcs (the charging arc used to dive underwater). Sometimes they don’t. The person who won the previous Worlds gets to host the next one, and with that comes wide latitude to shape the competition rules.

When Taft Sibley got his fourth Mystery Worlds win in 2024, he chose the Leslie on the Hiawassee River in east Tennessee for the 2025 event. The spot is well known, relatively easy to access, and sits in a region with the highest concentration of squirt boaters in the country. Sibley’s motivation: get as many people in a squirt boat as possible.

It worked. Locals walking the riverside trail saw 100 competitors and spectators floating in a rubber flotilla the size of a pickleball court, staring at the same patch of water. They had no idea that when a camo-colored boat resurfaced, and the flotilla lost its mind, Grizzell had just nailed a 39.10-second alternate-charc ride to win the title. There is no prize money, just a traveling trophy.

Some winners choose a mission over a classic location: a new river, an unfamiliar seam, a place that requires travel and time on-site to learn the seam. Grizzell’s pitch for the Salmon River in 2026 follows that tradition.

“Could it flop on me?” Grizzell said. “Yeah, it could flop. But who cares? It’ll still be squirt boating.”

While the competition is fierce, a cavalier approach to regulation means radically different boats line up in the same event. Stuffing in eight pounds of lead is fair game. So is showing up in something that barely sinks or floats navel deep.

“At the end of the day, skill matters more than the boat,” said Sibley.

“Taft and I call it Beach Week,” Grizzell added. “Everyone else goes to the beach for a week in the summer. We go to a mystery spot and milk it for everything it’s got, sun up to sundown, and try to get the biggest rides we can out of the place.”

The beach-week attitude keeps the competition from getting too precious. People come back less for titles and more for the chance to spend a week pushing a strange little craft a bit farther than last time, with the same people who understand.

Squirt Boating: The Wettest Form of Kayaking (Video)

Charli K. Elder is a journalist and Ph.D. who writes and researches about action sports, risk and power.

This article was published in Issue 75 of Paddling Magazine. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine’s print and digital editions, or browse the archives.

Snagging bubbles and getting deep. “At the end of the day, skill matters more than the boat,” said four-time Mystery Worlds champion Taft Sibley. | Feature photo: Joel Wolpert