Editorial: The Dam Dumbs

Stories

By

-

June 1, 2005

Photo: Trethewey F./Muskoka Falls/Muskoka R./Mediocre/NTS Map Sheet — Editorial: The Dam Dumbs

A friend of mine calls them “The dumbs”. These are the things you do, dumb things, that at the time seem reasonable but eventually go so wrong that you can’t believe you did them in the first place.

It’s a condition that has escaped serious medical research but is most commonly found in males aged 18–35. An example of the dumbs is driving a Hummer into a hood-deep wall of snow, spending two hours digging it out with an avalanche shovel, and then backing up to try it again, getting myself only six feet further and much more stuck.

Another example is reaching over my handlebars to pull leaves out of my front brakes while riding my mountain bike on a rough trail.

Sometimes you get lucky and escape the consequences of the dumbs. Other times the consequences are immediately obvious, like when I reached for that leaf and got my fingers caught in the spokes, stopping the wheels with my weight forward and sending me screaming over the handlebars. But the worst cases of the dumbs happen when you don’t even realize what you’ve done, until later.

When Linda Halliday called a few weeks ago she explained she was bewildered and very disappointed, but by the tone of her voice I could tell she was actually pissed off. She’d just picked up the early summer issue of Rapid [online V7 I2] which fell open to the feature story, “Code Name Rubber Chicken: A Calculated Assault on Cottage Country Creeks” in which there appeared a photo of a paddler running a hydro control gate at Trethewey Falls.

The photo was taken more than a year ago in perfect spring light just as the boat was dropping through the dam on the curtain of water. It was all framed by the red brick structure and “Extreme Danger” signs. Linda, however, doesn’t think it is such a great shot. She’s a public affairs officer for Ontario Power Generation (OPG), the company that owns the dam and posted the signs.

You need a few more background details here to grasp the depth of this case of the dumbs.

Linda had my phone number handy because that morning I’d emailed her a sponsorship proposal for Palmer Fest, a whitewater canoe and kayak festival I was organizing. I had asked OPG to sponsor the event specifying that their sponsorship money would be used to further their “Stay clear, stay safe” dam safety public education campaign. In fact, I was quite proud of this partnership. I believe it makes perfect sense to work co-operatively with the people who manage the flows of the rivers we paddle. Until Linda’s call, I hadn’t made the connection with the previous year’s photograph.

Being anywhere near (to say nothing of actually running) a dam is exactly what Linda’s dam education campaign is supposed to discourage. The longer Linda and I talked, the more I realized OPG’s commitment to dam safety and the more I realized we should not have printed the photo.

Rapid would never run a photo of a paddler in whitewater without a helmet, nor would we illustrate the combination of alcohol and boating in any way. For the same reasons a photo of a paddler dropping a dam should never have been printed in that article.

Our sport doesn’t have a written code of conduct when it comes to choosing lines or running rapids, however we do have a solid respect for river safety that we’ve built through experience that makes us responsible paddlers.

According to American Whitewater, 10 per cent of all whitewater deaths are a result of victims coming into contact with dams. In this issue we thought we should have a look at why these river “features” are so dangerous—the take-home message being that these obstructions, for the most part, are industrial facilities and not the whitewater playgrounds we are used to scouting.

I’ve learned over the years that the only way to take the edge off a case of the dumbs (besides rest, ice, compression and elevation) is to tell everyone about it. Partly because, like misery, the dumbs love company—it makes you feel better when your friends try to top it, “You think that’s dumb? Well I once…”

But I think we really share stories of the dumbs because doing so can be our own humble public education campaign to stop others from doing the same.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.

I’m Not a Rower

Stories

By

Ben Aylsworth

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June 1, 2005

Illustration: Lorenzo Del Bianco — I'm Not a Rower

They will ask, “Whatcha doing this weekend?”

You will answer, “Paddling.”

Inevitably, they will reply, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to go rafting.” It will pain you even though you knew it was coming, even though you’ve heard it a hundred times. There is no polite reply.

Our sport may be growing, but people—family and best friends included—still have no clue what we do. They can’t grasp the difference between a 20-foot blob of black rubber filled with pasty, poorly-dressed punters and a responsive piece of plastic paddled by a party of one. Rafting involves a paddle, a helmet and a lifejacket and is therefore whitewater in their eyes. They don’t see the cunning with which kayakers pick our way down the river. They can’t imagine the freedom of slicing through a roadless landscape or planing down the face of a glassy wave. They’ve never felt their gut lurch at the lip of a drop, the sensation of being airborne and the impact upon landing. They think rafting looks fun.

“I’ve always wanted to do kayaking, but I am so afraid of flipping over and being trapped under the water,” they will continue if you bother impressing upon them the subtle differences between the sports. (You don’t bother explaining that you don’t “do” kayaking.)

It’s hard to reply to people who say they are scared of being trapped underwater because, deep down, kayakers are afraid of being trapped underwater. So you respond, “Don’t worry, when you want to bail, you bail. It’s automatic.”

Then, just to confirm you might as well be talking to a stump, they will blather on about how they heard from a friend’s uncle’s cousin that his neighbour got trapped and almost drowned…but didn’t.

“I would be scared of dying by going over a big waterfall,” they point out.

Of course they’d be scared of dying this way. Most of us would be, but a little perspective please.

Most of us would also be scared about skiing off huge cliffs we see in ski movies. So why isn’t there the same fear of skiing? Oh right, because you don’t hurtle off cliffs when you go skiing, you ski the blue runs.

The same complex understanding of kayaking is absent.

For some reason the innocent mob thinks if you’re in a kayak you’ve got to run Niagara Falls. I blame Tao Berman.

“Aren’t you scared of drowning?” they ask.

“Yes I am,” I reply. This stumps them and stalls the flow of stupid comments, but only for a moment.

“I went kayaking once out West. It was so amazing,” they gush. “We saw whales and starfish…”

“Whales don’t live in rivers,” I reply.

“What?”

“I paddle rivers. Whitewater rivers.”

“Oh…” Silence.

Due to the accessibility of lazy-man canoes, sea kayaking has quickly dwarfed our much cooler, bolder sport. Lame sports like rafting and sea kayaking take the same tools we use but apply them to something altogether different. Sea kayaking is not a sport, it’s speed walking on water.

Will people ever understand what we do? Will they understand the passion of putting on frozen gear at 8 a.m. to go paddle recently thawed ice? Will they comprehend that being free is losing yourself on a river? That the river is an equalizer where people from all walks of life are connected by a shared love?

No. As usual the masses will draw conclusions without knowing the full story. They’ll make things up about what scares them and what they don’t understand. They’ll decide paddling whitewater is way too extreme and keep the sport at an arm’s length.

When you’re strapping your kayak to your racks and they say, “Have fun rowing!” just smile and be glad they don’t ask to come along.

Ben Aylsworth considers himself an ambassador of the sport.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.

Open Canoe Technique: Side Surfing

Skills

By

Andrew Westwood

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June 1, 2005

Photo: Rick Matthews — Open Canoe Technique: Side Surfing

Side surfing is to canoeing as bull riding is to rodeo. Both give you a wild ride provided you’re in a kicking hole on a lively bull.

Side surfing occurs (whether you want it to or not) when your canoe is cradled in the trough of a breaking wave or hydraulic. Riding a hole perpendicularly to the current ranges from a smooth see-sawing action to a rough arm-jerkin’ bull ride with lots of splash entering your canoe and the ever-present threat of the upstream edge catching and you being thrown from your boat.

You’re unlikely to begin your bull-riding career on Little Yellow Jacket, a three-time world champion. Similarly, if you are new to side surfing don’t choose a hole that is too threatening—find one that has a short foam pile on the downstream side and a current entering the hole that isn’t too fast. The foam pile should be wide enough to accommodate the entire length of your canoe, with enough water below so that you won’t hit your head when you get bucked off.

A bull ride lasts eight seconds. We may be lucky to have a ride this long while side surfing, but then again if we get thrown from our saddle it’s not likely to hurt as much. Just remember cowboy, keep you upper body quiet, your hips loose, and hang on.

How to side surf:

Side surfing works when your canoe rests in the seam between the water falling over a rock and the recirculating foam pile on the downstream side.
Hold the canoe as flat as possible with only enough downstream tilt to keep the upstream edge from catching and flipping you.
Let your legs move with the boat and use them to control the tilt. Hold your upper body still and centre your weight over the canoe.
Place your paddle in the foam pile on your downstream side. Use forward and backward strokes for moving forward and back in the hole and braces if the surf gets too rough.

Andrew Westwood is a frequent contributor to Rapid, an open canoe instructor at the Madawaska Kanu Centre and a member of Team Esquif.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.

Cascade River, Class: Unknown

Stories

By

Raymond Schmidt

-

June 1, 2005

Photo: Ryan Creary — Cascade River, Class: Unknown

My Canadian Rockies Whitewater guidebooks are in rough shape. The covers are delaminating, the corners are abused, a mildewed crust of dried salad dressing stains one of the spines and the desiccated corpses of mosquitoes litter the pages describing good spring runs.

Any paddler who lives along the peaks separating Alberta from British Columbia knows about these books. They are river-running bibles. Split into two volumes covering 250 river runs, the obsessively detailed descriptions have eliminated any need for local river exploration. Helpful as the books may be, they have taken the adventure of paddling new rivers and run it through a printing press 5,000 times.

“Adventure,” writes Rockies guidebook author Stuart Smith “is a quality inherent to the process [of discovery], one that loses much of its appeal when someone else tells you how to do it or ad nauseam describes how it was done before.”

Easy for him to say after detailing every riffle in every rapid in the Rockies. “To be honest,” he claims, “I dislike guidebooks!” Those 650 pages must have been painful.

Paddling around Banff usually means choosing between a handful of standard runs like the Kicking Horse, Pipestone, Upper Bow and Kananaskis. Exploration is not really a part of the paddling ethic here anymore. Few people even bother looking for new runs since the guidebooks were released in the mid-1990s. Want to try a different river? Go to the library and look one up.

Now the frontier of exploration lies on the West Coast. With so much water and so many logging roads being hacked out of the bush, new runs are routinely opened. Guess where Smith lives now?

Today’s paddlers are moved by written words on a page, and end up doing only what has already been done. But it’s hard to blame paddlers for being followers when it seems our predecessors have been everywhere. The put-ins and take-outs may change from time to time, certain features might become more popular and there may be some new wood that finds its way into a local favourite, but there’s nothing really new out there.

Or is there?

“Ray, there’s nothing new around here. At least nothing that’s not full of wood—and I don’t do wood,” said Bruce, my devil-on-the shoulder friend after I told him that I may have found a nearby river not in a guidebook. Bruce, the wry skeptic, didn’t believe there could be anything worthwhile that had escaped attention.

It looked possible from studying the map. I had scoured the local topo maps and hit upon the Cascade River. I counted its contour lines, did some rough calculations and even dug up a flow history. It looked good. And it was only 15 minutes away from my house! But I second guessed myself too. It was just too close to town to have slipped under the radar. Back to the maps to see where I might have gone wrong (I did, after all, fail grade 11 math).

Again, it looked like the lengthy Cascade, which begins deep in the Banff wilderness, drops at a respectable gradient when squished tightly between two mountains for its final six kilometres.

My veins were coursing in anticipation of verifying this in three dimensions.

On my next day off, I hopped on my mountain bike and rode a popular stretch of singletrack, a few minutes east of Banff’s townsite. It darts and dives over roots and rocks along the shore of the dammed Lake Minnewanka. After following a side track from the mouth of the river I caught a disappointing glimpse of a flooded canyon and retreated back to the trail. Further on the sound of falling water drew me back through the trees to the river. Scrambling along the angled limestone slabs I stumbled across five good drops one on top of the other.

The power of the river pulled me upstream. Around every bend I found another good chunk of whitewater. These sets weren’t just the makings of a legitimate river run, but a great one.

Since it was August, river levels were too low and wouldn’t come up until next spring. So I had to sit impatiently on this new run all winter. I prayed for enough snow in the upper reaches of the Cascade to supply good flow.

I told no one.

When winter finally released its full nelson hold on the Rockies, it was time to convince a crew to haul their plastic five and a half kilometres to the put-in at the Cascade River Bridge. From my map work, I knew it was a pretty easy walk up an old overgrown fire road. But it was still a trek shouldering a boat and gear, something few 21st century paddlers seem comfortable with.

I called Chris and gave him the sell: “Never paddled it, don’t know what the water levels are, don’t know if it will be a good run, but how about hauling your creeker five klicks up a trail with me?” Chris didn’t seem to care about the hike, or about anything really, except paddling. He was in.

“There’s nothing new around here that’s not full of wood. And I don’t do wood.” Bruce’s words echoed in my head. I called him up anyway. “Sure,” came his surprising reply. Though he was not generally a gambling man, Bruce was still keen on arcane river adventures.

“Besides, I want to lose 30 pounds this summer,” he said.

That evening Bruce and I stayed up late to fashion crude kayak-carrying devices out of old backpacks and cam straps. Chris sat at home drinking beer. He would drag his boat.

At the trailhead, Chris waited while Bruce and I continued to fiddle with our backpack rigs. When we reached the Cascade Bridge two hours later, all three of us were dragging our boats.

“This is the calm section,” I pleaded as they peered in silent dejection at a listless straightaway. We were exhausted and had been abused by thousands of insects along the way. I sensed my crew was on the verge of mutiny. “I swear it’s going to get wild soon,” I reassured them, based on what, I wasn’t sure. Bruce plunged his face into the invisibly clear water and drank like an elephant.

The big melt hadn’t flooded the river yet, but—to my relief—the river began to wind itself up soon after we put in.

A bend in the river marked the first rapid, maybe a class III. We mashed through. The Cascade continued to pick up intensity, flowing from easy class II and III to more frequent and more challenging III’s, at least that’s what I guessed a guidebook would say.

After a couple of hours of scouting and running new set after new set, the river widened into a jumbled boulder garden before disappearing into a narrow slot around a blind corner. This was the entrance to the canyon and our first big test. Being in uncharted territory, our first task was to name the set. We called it the Hydrator, in honour of Bruce who was constantly pulling over to relieve himself.

It wasn’t overly treacherous compared to sets we had done on familiar runs, but with no Linus-blanket guidebook to clutch and a rain shower upping the forebodance factor, we were nervous about judging the grade for ourselves.

We deliberated, assessed the flow, judged consequences and picked a line. As the current drew me toward the horizon, I reassured myself that I was up to what waited below. Somewhere under my PFD I felt a tug-o-war between confidence and doubt. I closed my eyes and went for it. When I saw the light and pulled into the bottom eddy a buzz of self-reliance added to the usual rush of looking up at a completed run.

Evening was wrapping around us four superb drops later as we flushed under the Stewart Canyon Bridge and into Lake Minnewanka. The rains pulled back as the last light burned through the black clouds that straggled behind.

We had just paddled something that wasn’t in a guidebook. It had escaped the attention of even the local expe- dition paddlers that have scoured the earth for new runs. Much to Bruce’s surprise, there had been no wood.

In the following month of high water, local paddlers followed our steps up the fire road. The Cascade even dished out a bit of carnage, proving—in a harsh way—the run’s worth. A few nasty swims (this ain’t no pool drop affair) and a dangerous pin in the Hydrator (the crux, a class IV rapid, probably) have proved that the Cascade is no easy float through the mountains.

It’s no Tsang-Po either, but it’s still something that belongs in a guidebook. Eventually word came out that Stuart Smith had been there before us, but had left it out of his book due to space restrictions. I don’t know how or why it missed the cut but, looking back on my rediscovery, I’m glad it did.

My guidebook will continue to deteriorate from heavy use, but now every time I see the contoured lines of a topo map I wonder how many other rivers are out there flowing right under our noses, waiting to be explored if we’d just take those noses out of our guidebooks once in a while.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.

Traditional Canoe Building: Afloat Again

By

Jacqueline Windh

-

May 1, 2005

The dugout slices neatly through the still grey water. Sleek and streamlined, it is 34 feet long and shaped from a single red cedar log. I am paddling with the Martin family, returning from a potlatch hosted by a neighbouring tribe to the north. Our paddles keep time to the beating of the drum as a woman’s voice rises above us, chanting the long falling notes of an ancient paddling song.

“We must be nearly back in town now,” I think, but the thick fog has us paddling blind. I wonder if there are people on the docks, hearing this paddling song that had been nearly silenced for a century.

Ancestral Craft: The Building Of A Dugout Canoe

Traditional canoe building: Afloat again

Joe Martin carved this canoe. He is in the stern, a wide-bladed steering paddle of stiff yew wood in his hands. He takes a deep breath and joins in the song, his powerful voice seeming to push back the fog as a dark shape looms ahead. Tall posts supporting grey docks appear and I see the outlines of people above, looking out at us.

Joe’s voice is deep and rich. “I come from a long line of canoe carvers,” he tells me. “I learned the art of canoe building from my late father and my grandfathers, and from other elders who are now gone. I have a responsibility to pass on this knowledge.”

His black eyes are shaded by heavy brows, but they light up when he talks. “When I was just a young boy and my father was carving canoes he took us with him. I was not allowed to just stay home. I’d watch him work. That was my classroom I guess, although I didn’t realize it at the time.”

Joe is Tla-o-qui-aht, one of 17 tribes that make up the Nuuchah-nulth nation, the people who live “all along the mountains” in northernmost Washington State and along Vancouver Island’s wild outer coast. As a seafaring people, they were long famed for making some of the most seaworthy canoes on the coast. The canoe was their source of transportation: for travelling to visit neighbouring tribes, for seasonal migration, for making war, and for offshore whaling expeditions.

Cultural traditions under attack

The first Europeans who arrived on the West Coast in 1774 were greeted by a fleet of canoes. Within decades of that first contact, the West Coast native population was decimated by introduced diseases. A century later, the Canadian government passed the Indian Act, making native people legal wards of the state and relegating them to reserve lands. Children were removed to Christian missions and residential schools. Between depopulation and the loss of contact between children and their elders, the thread of traditional knowledge became frayed within scant generations. In many tribes the losses were too great; knowledge of things such as how to build canoes disappeared.

[ Paddling Buyer’s Guide: View all wooden canoes ]

Joe has seen evidence of these losses first-hand. “I worked in logging camps when I was younger. As we were logging, we came across old canoes that were just shaped and left there. It wasn’t until some time later that I realized they were not just abandoned there. Those fellas were carving them and they probably died from the disease epidemics that affected the communities. That’s why they were left there.”

“If you can carve your own canoe, you don’t have to rely on anybody for anything.”

Realizing that few among their generation retained the canoe-building knowledge of the elders, Joe and his brothers knew that they had to keep carving canoes, both for the sake of their ancestors, from whom the knowledge came, and for their future. “The dugout canoe is one of the most important symbols we have of freedom, freedom of our people in our lands. One of the things that my late father said was, ‘If you can carve your own canoe, you don’t have to rely on anybody for anything.’ It makes you totally independent, which our people were before the Indian Act.”

Passing canoe building on to the future

Where the knowledge from their elders was incomplete, the Martin brothers researched, visiting museums and looking through historical documents. They ventured into the forests looking for giant trees, and learned both by their successes and by their mistakes—how to keep the wood from splitting, how to use power tools to speed the process, how to widen the canoe by steaming it.

Chuck Commanada's birchbark canoes are crafted by hand, using traditional methods he learned from his grandparents. | Photo: Bob Tymczyszyn

How Chuck Commanda’s Handcrafted Birchbark Canoes Are Bringing People Together

The Martin brothers, along with their late father, have carved over 40 canoes. They’ve sold some of these canoes to neighbouring tribes and given away canoes at potlatches, helping to spread the knowledge that their family has maintained.

While this is a great satisfaction to Joe, he is even happier listening to the voice that cuts through the fog as we approach the dock. It is his daughter Gisele. Joe has passed the knowledge of his ancestors on to her. He now sees Gisele carrying the old teachings into the modern world. Three years ago she started a business taking tourists on cultural tours in her father’s hand-made canoes, paddling herself and her community out of the fog and toward a brighter future.

Jacqueline Windh is the author of The Wild Edge, a book of photos and words about the outer coast of Vancouver Island.

Cover of the Summer 2005 issue of Canoeroots Magazine This article was first published in the Summer 2005 issue of Canoeroots Magazine. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine’s print and digital editions, or browse the archives.

Joe Martin and his brothers keep the Nuuchah-nulth nation’s traditional canoe building methods alive. | Feature photo: Jacqueline Windh

Editorial: Gonzo Paddling

Stories

By

Scott MacGregor

-

May 1, 2005

Photo: flickr.com/rcsj — Editorial: Gonzo Paddling

Hunter S. Thompson died this month at age 67. He shot himself with a handgun in the kitchen of his Colorado home. It was no secret he had a thing for guns.

Until the follow-up radio talk shows I didn’t know much about him. I’d heard his name and recognized the titles of his Fear and Loathing books, but that’s about all. I would have been more in touch if I’d been looking for free love and questioning the establishment in the early 1970s, but at the time I was still chewing on my fists, not shaking them in the air.

Journalists and hippies considered Hunter S. Thompson to be a brilliant political and social writer. The rest of the world considered him to be a complete whack job. He followed Nixon on the campaign trail, rode with the Hells Angels and once wrote, “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone… but they’ve always worked for me.”

Another thing that worked for him was his unique writing style, something called “gonzo journalism”—a new way of reporting the story with a strong author’s voice and a focus on the mood of the event, even if that meant taking some liberties with facts and objectivity.

Almost every talk show host wrapped up by suggesting Thompson was one of the most important American writers of the 20th century.

Sad, I thought, that I’m a writer and journalist who lived in the 20th century and here’s this larger-than-life outlaw cult figure that I know nothing about.

A friend stopped by while I was reading up on Hunter S. He thought I’d want to know that Heinz Poenn had suffered a heart attack.

“That’s too bad, is he all right?” I asked before admitting that I didn’t know who we were talking about.

Heinz Poenn taught himself to paddle in a Klepper folding kayak and started slalom racing in 1958. In 1972, the same year Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas raced to cult status, Poenn raced for Canada at the Olympics in Munich, Germany. Later he became a driving force behind the building of the Minden Whitewater Preserve so he and others would have a place to train. Poenn went on to coach both the provincial and national slalom teams.

Sad, I thought that I’m a writer and paddler who lived in the 20th century and here’s this pioneer of the whitewater community that I know nothing about.

At a new adventure sports complex and whitewater course in Maryland they’ve proposed creating a Whitewater Hall of Fame and Adventure Sports Museum to “honor those individuals who have made significant accomplishments in and contributions to whitewater paddling sports.”

I like the idea of a Hall of Fame to clarify and remember significant accomplishments. But, I worry that a hall of fame would be too stuffy. I think that our whitewater history is better written with a shot of the late Hunter S. Thompson’s gonzo style—because like politics, whitewater’s deepest truths are found on the eddylines between fact and fiction.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.

Hass Hole: Editors Reveal Their Secret Playspot

Stories

By

Scott MacGregor

-

May 1, 2005

Photo: Scott MacGregor — Hass Hole: Editors Reveal Their Secret Playspot

For seven years we’ve been exposing other people’s secret whitewater stashes to the world. We’ve been providing detailed directions to park and play hotspots to the dismay of locals everywhere. Under the protective cloak of servicing the greater good for all paddlers, we’d ferret out a mole and buy their soul for 20 cents a word, sometimes less. Here is mine on a platter.

Hass Hole is our local playspot, one that has, until now, mysteriously escaped editorial coverage. Getting to Hass Hole (sounds like ass hole, not hoss hole) is like trying to find Smurf Village. Take the first left past the pancake house. At the fork in the road, go left. Drive past the dark and evil cedar swamp and over the one-lane wooden bridge crossing Snake Creek. At the mailbox marked Hass turn left down the dusty lane to the farm. Signs on fence posts read, “This is our land. Government BACK OFF.” If your car quits, just leave it.

This has been Hass land since the beginning of time. Dogs are chained to old cars. When the dogs bark at you Clifford or Freida Hass will emerge from the tiny farmhouse surrounded by lawn ornaments and geranium pot planters. A long chat about the weather and $2.50 per paddler later you’re 4x4ing

down the unmarked lane through an automotive graveyard of burned-out pickups and rusty trailers. More than one group of paddlers has made it this far, never to reach the river and Hass Hole.

Hass Hole is part of Island Rapids, the first set on the Lower Madawaska River run, a section of river that is without question the most popular whitewater canoe day trip in Canada. The canoe-tripping boy scout’s black hole of death is Hass Hole proper, a six-foot wide cartwheel and loop spot of a pourover. The more-often paddled wave behind Hass Hole is a small breaking wave that anyone can surf. Beginners take bigger and bigger surfs out to the middle where the five-foot-high vertical wave tubes and crashes.

Don’t listen to anyone who says the water is too high to paddle at Hass Hole. Locals know that at high water the lovely Ms. April makes an appearance above Hass Hole. Put even more water in the Madawaska and turn the page to the middle of the river to a feature known as Centrefold. One peek at the walls inside the hunter’s cabin and you’ll know where Ms. April and Centrefold get their names—not to mention that one forms in April and the other is a breaking wave that folds perfectly on itself in the centre of the river—centrefold. Cheeky but clever, wouldn’t you agree?

Details, details…

WHO SHOULD PADDLE THERE?
Everyone. It is a class III rapid with first-class play. The pool below is an easy swim to shore.

PAY TO PLAY
Stop and pay at the farmhouse. $2.50 is cheap for the convenience. Not to mention that Cheryl Gallant was the only Alliance Party M.P. elected in Ontario, some say on opposition to the gun registry alone.

WHEN TO GO:
From ice-out in March until the middle of June (usually). Come again in wet autumns. Check with Ontario Power Generation www.opg.com for Kaminiskeg Lake (Palmer Rapids) Dam output levels. Anything above 65 cms is enough.

WHEN NOT TO GO
During deer hunting season. It’s their only holiday and they’re using the cabin.

HOW TO GET THERE
The Madawaska River is located three hours northeast of Toronto and two hours west of Ottawa. Buy a map. Nolet’s Pancake House is on Highway 28, east of Hardwood Lake. Turn north onto Bruceton Road just east of Nolet’s. Left at the fork. Cross the bridge. Left at the first driveway on left. Stop at farm. Keep on the main laneway about two kilometres to the river. Good luck.

STUPIDEST QUESTION EVER ASKED TO CLIFFORD HASS.
“Think my car will make it back up the lane?” It didn’t.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.

Women Paddlers Need a Venus

Stories

By

Ben Aylsworth

-

May 1, 2005

In the 1990s women sucked at freestyle kayaking. Why? One theory was that men are taller and stronger. For years men were happy with this state of affairs. We chivalrously loaded our girlfriends’ boats onto our cars and helped portage them past rapids. If our girlfriends were hungry we’d wander off into the bush, snare a rabbit or slay a deer with a river knife to provide for her. It was a primitive existence, and it made men feel good about themselves.

From the woods surrounding the rivers came butchy women with rusty razors. They were carrying placards and whining something about equal rights. They more or less admitted they sucked but they said it was because they didn’t have boats and equipment that fit them properly. This talk spread like Dermatone through the eddies and shuttle roads where women paddlers congregated. Before long, even the splashing of guys launching helixes and landing Roladexes couldn’t drown out the protests:

My boobs are scrunched.
This shaft is too long and thick (yes, I actually heard this).
The hole is too sticky.
There’s too much volume in my stern (who owns this problem?).

Nothing was ever just right for the disenfranchised Goldie Locks.

In an attempt to forestall legislative action, manufacturers complied. Women now have boats like the Siren that are designed for them. Seven 2 makes the Daisy paddle just for women. PFD companies make models for women that “wrap rather than crush for a perfect fit that ONLY WOMEN can understand.” Shred Ready makes the Vixen helmet. Hell, for some reason Immersion Research makes spray skirts for women—the ‘J Lo’ no less.

Have the pro women caught up to the men? Uh… No. Women haven’t even caught up to where men were in the ’90s. At the last World Freestyle Championships in Australia the men’s scores tripled the women’s.

What women really need is a Venus! Relax folks, this is a family show. I said Venus, as in Venus Williams the tennis superstar. The arrival of Venus and Serena Williams silenced the critics of women’s tennis.

Men used to watch tennis for Kournikova and Hingis—the play was slow but the skirts were short. Women tennis players were considered material for Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue pin-ups. People said the women’s game would never match the men’s play of high-powered serves and fast volleys.

Then on to the court stepped Venus and Serena. No longer was women’s tennis boring. It was high-powered fast action. The game lunged from the swimsuit calendars and smashed back onto the court. Today, the Williams are the biggest names in tennis, easily stealing the hype from the men’s game. I’m not suggesting that women’s boating is too sexy for its own good. If that were the case I’d just keep my mouth shut. I’m just saying that the Williams sisters didn’t excuse themselves with complaints about thick shafts and fuzzy balls: they just kicked ass.

If whitewater had a Venus, men would be a little less, shall we say… cocky.

Ben Aylsworth just released his latest video H2Ho, which is not a family show.

This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.

Celebrating The Gull River’s Strong Undercurrents In Canadian Whitewater

Stories

By

Jeff Jackson

-

May 1, 2005

As paddlers we are proud of our stories—epic highwater runs, bold moves, long swims. Many of our best stories persist and are retold until they are legends.

Other paddling stories are just the opposite: they are so mundane they do not warrant repeating—at least not at the time—and so the stories and people seem to be forgotten.

Looking closely, however, one can see that the story is not forgotten, but in fact is so deeply ingrained in the fabric of a paddling scene that it goes almost unnoticed. These aren’t climactic legends, but fundamental building blocks, people and places like Roger Parsons, Heinz Poenn and the Minden Wildwater Preserve.

semi-submerged photo of the kayak training course at Minden Whitewater Preserve

Rivers Of Change: Roger Parsons And The Minden Wildwater Preserve

Celebrating the Gull River’s strong undercurrents in Canadian whitewater

A young mountain climber named Heinz Poenn arrived in Canada from Germany in 1956 in search of adventure. After finding no mountains to climb in Ontario, he happened upon a Klepper folding kayak, taught himself to paddle, and found another paddling pioneer named Roger Parsons. The two of them organized a kayak race. The year was 1958, and the Credit River played host to Canada’s second-ever kayak event (the Fraser River in B.C. beat them by one season, a downriver race easily won by a visiting European). The rest is history, albeit an unappreciated and forgotten one.

In 1964 Poenn and Parsons decided they wanted to race slalom at the World Championships—big dreams for self-taught fanatics. At the time, Canada had no standing with the international kayak body so they joined the American team.

Poenn gained himself (and Canada) a seat on the International Competition Committee, opening the door for a Canadian team—which included himself—to paddle at the 1972 Olympics in Germany.

“We were way behind!” Poenn laughs. “We had only started into something that had a long competitive history over there.”

Returning from the Olympics, he and Parsons started talking about a training centre. They already paddled at the then-mild rapids on the Gull River in Minden, Ontario, close to Parsons’ cottage, and they saw potential for something greater.

“Being on the technical committee, I had detailed plans from the Augsberg slalom course [built for the Olympics and still in use on the World Cup circuit],” says Poenn. “We asked Ontario’s Ministry of Lands and Forests to change the river. They agreed, so we hired a backhoe and bulldozer and started moving rocks.”

From obscure river to whitewater destination

Originally, only the lower section of the river was paddled, below the falls, because the upper section below the dam was wide and shallow. Poenn and Parsons coordinated pinching the river, deepening the channel, solidifying the eddies and making a world-class slalom river.

“I was the only one to run the falls,” remembers Poenn. “They were considered too steep and shallow to be safe, so we got some locals who knew how to use dynamite, drilled some holes, and blew the edge off it.”

“Eventually land was acquired on the left riverbank for the now-famous campground. “The whole idea was for Minden to be a place for the paddling community to meet,” says Poenn who continued on to coach national teams, teaching a generation of top paddlers which included Gary Barton, David Ford, Claudia Van Wijk and Poenn’s son, Dieter.

“There was no fixed place for paddlers at the time,” Dieter Poenn recalls of his days as a junior racer. “But this developed into a perfect training site. We could build confidence on the lower section and work our way up. The river is still comparable to anything I raced on in Europe.” Dieter Poenn went on to race with Canada’s National Slalom Team, he eventually took on the role of high performance director.

Overhead shot of river cutting through the forest, rapids visible

Stefi Van Wijk: Carving Her Own Course On The Madawaska

Claudia Van Wijk, a former world cup paddler who now owns Madawaska Kanu Centre, recalls: “I used to live there for weeks on end. It’s one of the few places where you can drop in at anytime and find people to paddle with. It’s dam-controlled so it always has water, it’s close to Toronto and it’s still as technically challenging as any slalom course in Europe. Really, Ontario’s three destination rivers are Minden, the Ottawa and Palmer Rapids.”

[ Plan your next Ontario whitewater adventure with the Paddling Trip Guide ]

The Minden Wildwater Preserve is a story without an end. The river has undergone continuous improvements. People still arrive from all over, make friends and paddle. Beginners tip over in the run out at the bottom, and the top offers snappy moves that approach class IV. Running the dam is enough to scare anyone. The river is so deeply ingrained in the thoughts of the paddling community it has helped sustain that it sometimes goes unnoticed. To many paddlers, Minden is the Ontario paddling scene.

All this, from simple 1960s dreams of having a place to paddle.

Jeff Jackson is a professor of the outdoor program at Algonquin College in Pembroke, Ont.

Cover of Early Summer 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine This article was first published in the Early Summer 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine’s print and digital editions, or browse the archives.

The Gull River is so deeply ingrained in the thoughts of the paddling community it has helped sustain that it sometimes goes unnoticed. | Feature photo: Toni Harting

Turn Your Kayak More Effectively With The Duffek Stroke

By

Sarah Boudens

-

May 1, 2005

Man whitewater kayaking — Duffek for freedom. | Destination Ontario

In the early 1950s, European slalom paddler Milo Duffek invented the stroke that bears his name and changed slalom racing forever. When it comes to adjusting a boat’s direction, there is no stroke that can compare to the Duffek in efficiency and effectiveness. But it’s not just for slalom paddlers. The same effectiveness that made it revolutionary on the racecourse makes it useful for all paddlers who like to exert influence over which direction their kayaks point.

By mastering the Duffek and working an offside tilt into your turns, you’ll be able to catch narrow micro-eddies and make quick mid-stream changes in direction anywhere on the river. Unlike the reverse sweep, the Duffek allows you to maintain your forward momentum. Compared to the trustworthy low brace, the Duffek offers little stability yet really lets you snap your boat around.

You must Duffek, Duffek good

The Duffek’s different uses involve different set-ups, tilts and stroke combinations, but the essentials are straightforward. Paddle forward in flatwater and plant a vertical paddle away from the front of your boat at about a 45-degree angle. The paddle blade should be open so you feel pressure on the power face of the blade. Keeping your arms solid for support, use your abs to twist your torso and whip the boat around. Think of it as bringing your knees to the paddle. Once the boat reaches the paddle, you’re set to follow-through with a forward stroke.

To help you visualize, think about swinging around a pole. Your paddle should be solidly planted in the water like a pole. You need to swing your body and boat around until you face the direction you want to go. That’s it really; just make sure that for now your top arm doesn’t come above your forehead, leaving your shoulder vulnerable to injuries.

[ Further reading: Breakdown Of The Most Common Paddling Injuries ]

Duffek into the current

When carving out of an eddy, cross the eddyline while tilting downstream and initiate the turn with a sweep. Plant the Duffek. Once the boat has turned and your paddle is next to your knee, pull on the blade with your forward stroke. As you enter into the current, you’ll feel the force of the water on the blade and your boat will turn very quickly.

Duffek into an eddy

When entering an eddy, the Duffek allows you to turn upstream quickly without drifting low or running too deep into the eddy.

Set yourself up to catch an eddy as you normally would. Punch the eddyline and initiate the turn upstream with a sweep. Plant the Duffek. Pull the boat to the paddle and then follow through with a forward stroke. In short boats, you won’t need to initiate with a forward sweep unless it’s a really strong eddyline or you’re approaching without a sharp enough angle. If you engage the outside edge of your boat immediately after your bow crosses the eddyline, the combination of an outside tilt and a Duffek stroke stops the boat from carving or sliding and it sticks your position in the eddy.

Duffek around the river

When we’re paddling around the river we always need to make minor adjustments to boat angle and the Duffek is the perfect stroke for this. Simply plant the Duffek in the direction you want to go, snap the boat to your paddle and paddle forward. The Duffek offers excellent control without compromising your forward momentum. This may sound similar to the draw. To avoid confusion, remember you use the Duffek to turn the boat and you use the draw to change lateral position, without changing direction.

Milo Duffek changed the world by developing a stroke combination with both stability (in the form of a high brace) and power (because it leaves your paddle poised for a forward stroke). Combine the Duffek with an outside edge tilt and you’ll discover that, 50 years later, you’ll enjoy having far more control over where you go on the river.

[ Paddling Trip Guide: View all kayaking instruction and skills clinics ]

This stroke in history

Prior to the Duffek, paddlers turned kayaks by using a reverse sweep. Effective, yes, but reverse sweeps slowed down the boat too much to be useful in racing. Milo Duffek, a native of Czechoslovakia, unveiled his secret weapon—the Duffek—for the first time at the 1953 World Championships in Merino, Italy.

As competitors watched Milo practice, word of the new stroke spread and the question became not if he’d win, but by how much.

This is where the story takes a dramatic turn.

Milo Duffek had come to Italy with plans that were more ambitious than winning hold. Duffek was going to defect. Escaping from his newly communist Czechoslovakia for the freedom of Western Europe was more important to him than a medal. As the story goes, Duffek purposefully hit the outside of gate 14 with his bow. This was a 100-second penalty in those days, and enough to drop him to second place. This second-place finish removed Duffek from the limelight and allowed him enough anonymity to skip town with the Swiss team.

This article originally appeared in Rapid‘s Early Summer 2005 issue. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine’s print and digital editions here, or browse the archives here.

Sarah Boudens is a member of Canada’s Slalom Development Team.

Duffek for freedom. | Destination Ontario