Adventure Kayak reader Robin Murray didn’t have a big, fancy sea kayak to share with little Millie. That’s okay, we don’t think she noticed. Location: Ardeche River, France.
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This article originally appeared in Rapid’s late summer 2011 issue.
The recent rash of carbon fiber playboats from mainstream kayak companies—think Wave Sport, Jackson and Fluid with Pyranha poised to folow—and specialized manufacturers like freestyle sector upstarts Black Sheep, Titan, ZET and Vajda, has some kayakers wondering: who needs carbon, anyway? Can it really make the average playboater that much better or is this just a new toy to keep the pro paddlers happy?
Black Sheep Kayaks designer and builder Dave Nieuwenhuis says, “The upper echelon of freestyle paddlers are the ones buying or expressing interest in carbon boats. The majority of kayakers couldn’t justify owning a carbon boat simply because of where they paddle.”
Why does it matter where you paddle? Rocks.
Nieuwenhuis compares a carbon boat to a high-end sports car, “Your Ferrari might soak up a few bumps and your carbon boat should handle a few rocks, but do you really want to test that out?”
This means you need to avoid shallow features, sliding down the banks into the water and throwing it in the back of your truck to rattle around. And you really ought to tuck it into a soft, cozy boat bag to prevent scratches and sun damage.
The other disadvantage for the average boater is the hefty price tag— about two grand more than a plastic counterpart. For some serious riders, however, the siren song of carbon is simply irresistible. Canadian Freestyle Team member Keegan Grady worked all winter to save up enough money to buy a carbon boat, “It’s the best investment I’ve made in my riding to date.”
So what makes carbon such a good investment? More stiffness and less weight. Nieuwenhuis explains, “Although a plastic boat may appear to be stiff on the water, the upward deflection of the plastic hull is unavoidable. It’s simply the nature of the material. Carbon boats with foam cores have zero hull deformation and the result is an incredibly stiff surf that gives the truest sensation of floating. They surf like nothing else.”
The feathery weight of carbon is equally important. “Carbon boats are extremely responsive and seemingly effortless in comparison to similar plastic boats,” Nieuwenhuis continues. Which is why more and more pro freestyle paddlers are converting to composite.
Level Six Capital Cup 2011 champion and carbon advocate Adam Chappell says, “It took awhile to dial in tricks because the boat was so reactive on a wave. Now I don’t think I could ever go back to paddling plastic.”
At the 2009 Freestyle World Championships in Thun, Switzerland, plastic boats dominated a smattering of then just-emerging composite rides. Still, when this magazine went to press, carbon ruled the quivers of top paddlers competing at this summer’s Worlds.
So, despite their disadvantages for the average paddler, carbon boats clearly have their place on the water. But do they make you a better boater? Not according to Grady, “Carbon boats are an undeniable advantage, but I think the best rider will win regardless. The 2009 Worlds were a testament to that.”
This article originally appeared in Rapid, Summer/Fall 2011. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.
EpicTV introduces Water & People, an exclusive five-episode series, retracing a year of adventure in some of the wildest places on earth.
Let yourself get carried away by rivers , astonishing scenery and the lifestyle nomadic kayaker experience. Coming next , “State of Matter” , the story of a 20 days multi-sports venture in the heart of British Colombia .
Every whitewater kayak has edges of some sort. Some of them are so pronounced that you can reach your hands under your kayak and feel big grooves running parallel along the length of the hull. Some kayaks have less aggressive edges. These edges will feel like rounded corners on the hull of your kayak, and are sometimes so round that the kayak feels like it has no edges at all. However, if used correctly, even these round-bottom kayaks can be paddled on edge.
The purpose of edges on a whitewater kayak is to provide the boat with a flat, stable hull to surf waves and glide across the water on. Edges are responsible for making whitewater kayaks maneuverable and easy to turn in whitewater, as well as making it possible to go in and out of different river currents without capsizing.
Edging a kayak is actually quite easy in flatwater. In order to engage the right edge of your kayak, lift your left knee. In order to engage your left edge, lift your right knee. The part where edging becomes difficult, is when you combine it with moving water and whitewater. For this reason, it is important to practice edging in flatwater before you take it to the river.
When sitting in a kayak, there are several exercises you can do to practice edging.
For the first edging drill, sit straight upright in your kayak, as if you have a string coming through the top of your head and holding your body in good posture. Have a friend randomly call out “Right,” “Left,” or “Go.” When your friend calls “Go,” lift one knee at a time repeatedly and at a fast pace, so you are rocking back and forth from one edge to another.
As soon as your friend calls “Right,” you stop on your right edge, tightening your left oblique muscles in order to keep your kayak on edge as much as possible. When your friend says “Left,” you do the same thing on your left side. Have your friend call out these commands, one at a time, with several seconds in between them, for about a minute. Take a rest and note how tired your obliques and hip flexors are, then repeat the exercise again.
The second edging drill is less focused on building strength in your obliques, and more focused on creating awareness and stability around the edges of your kayak. This drill exposes the kayaker to the four different “levels” of edge. When paddling different difficulties of whitewater, you will use different levels of edge—lower levels for easier whitewater, and higher levels for more challenging whitewater,
This drill is effective in teaching a kayaker how to control their edges, and how to maneuver their body in a way that allows for the most efficient edging techniques. Practice holding each level of edge for 20 seconds, then switch sides and do the same thing with the other edge.
Learning how to maneuver a kayak in whitewater can be daunting, but if you know how to edge your kayak properly, the task becomes effortless. An eddy turn is used when you paddle into an eddy or out of an eddy and into the main current. Eddy turns are tricky because the oncoming current you are paddling into has the possibility of grabbing your edge and capsizing you.
The key with eddy turns is to edge your kayak away from the oncoming current. If you are leaving an eddy stationed on the left side of the river and paddling into the main current to head downstream, you will want to lift your right knee, sit on your left edge, and lean away from the oncoming current.
A good way of remembering what to do when edging for eddy turns is to think of the phrase “fart upstream.” If you pretend you are letting out a toot toward the oncoming water, you will lift the correct edge and hopefully avoid capsizing.
Just like edging a surfboard to surf an ocean wave, you must edge your whitewater kayak in order to surf a river wave in your kayak.
If you want to carve to the right, dig your right edge into the wave. If you want to carve to the left, dig your left edge into the wave. Keep edging back and forth, placing rudder strokes as you do this, and you will be surfing away!
A boof is a kayaking stroke used to keep the bow of the kayak up while kayaking over a large hydraulic (often called a “hole”) in the river. A boof stroke is placed at the edge of a drop, waterfall or just before a hole. The kayaker positions their body forward, puts their kayak on edge, plants the stroke, thrusts their hips forward, then leans forward again and flattens the boat back to a level 0. The goal of all this is to avoid plugging the kayak into the hole and getting stuck.
The purpose of putting the kayak on edge while boofing is to have as little surface of your kayak on the water as possible. This creates less surface drag, which allows you to have more lift when you take your boof stroke.
A kayaking brace is a stroke used to prevent a capsize. As soon as a kayaker feels themselves being pushed onto their edge and about to capsize, they plant a brace stroke, and edge the other direction. The goal is to get the boat back to flat, thus preventing a capsize.
Bracing is best practiced in flatwater. First, you are going to lift one knee to put your kayak onto a level 4 edge. As soon as you feel the kayak starting to capsize, smash the back face of your paddle into the water just perpendicular to your kayak. Use the water’s surface tension on your paddle blade to gather momentum the other way, and edge your kayak in the other direction—hopefully back to flat.
Freshwater surf on Lake Superior’s north shore peaks in late summer and autumn when the warming waters release their ferocious energy. “The onshore wind was so strong,” remembers Adventure Kayak editor Virginia Marshall of this October surf day, “that I couldn’t even punch out past the final break. But there was no shortage of excitement in the soup!”
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Hand most kayakers a GoPro and they’ll attach it to their helmet and charge through the surf. Shay Bickley, Chris Bensch and Jason Self—known as Team Out of Sight, Out of Mind (OSOM)—mounted their camera on a grocery cart and filmed themselves trying to buy food without plastic packaging. “We couldn’t do it,” recalls Bensch. “We couldn’t make a single meal without plastic.”
The three Portland friends formed Team OSOM when the Deepwater Horizon gushed oil into the Gulf of Mexico for 87 days in 2010. Environmental disasters usually cause more fear and despair than action. But Bensch, Bickley and Self went from spectators to activists. Three years later, they’ve launched a nationwide cleanup contest; kayaked 100 miles down the Columbia River collecting litter and towing a garbage-filled canoe for their first film project, Trashpedition; and are working on a three-part film series, The Search for the Perfect Day.
“We’d been complaining about things that affect paddlers: water pollution, salmon dying off and ocean health,” says Self. “We didn’t have money, but we had access to Facebook,” he adds. “We started the Never-Ending Cleanup Contest, where people pick up trash, post photos and win prizes. It was a place to start with what we had.”
OSOM provides an end-run around barriers posed by science and politics. “Most people are motivated by emotion, not science,” says Self, who has a background in environmental science. But voting with dollars is something everyone can do relatively easily. “Cleaning up beautiful places is a launching pad to thinking about purchasing habits,” says Bickley.
Their latest endeavor, The Search for Perfect Day, was filmed in Northern California, Florida and Kauai. Set for release this summer, the series will highlight outdoor exploration and the intersection of natural beauty with less picturesque elements.
“Kauai is a paradise,” says Bensch.“But it’s also where the Hawaiian Chain bumps against the Northern Pacific Gyre—a.k.a Great Pacific Garbage Patch—where plastic degrades and enters the water column and food chain. Some of the highest concentrations of PBDEs (an endocrine-disrupting chemical in plastics) ever measured are in the breast milk of Pacific orcas.”
The Search for the Perfect Day begins to blend in the science and politics of trash, featuring interviews with researchers, wildlife rehabilitators and advocates such as Jennifer Savage of the Ocean Conservancy, who surfs both ocean waves and the rougher seas of the California State Assembly.
OSOM’s future will be experimentation and evolution.“We’re still finding our voice and how much we can do balancing day jobs,” says Bensch, who works as a kayak coach. He’s also an avid surf kayaker, organizing the Pacific Paddle Surf Series and traveling to Australia in July to compete in the 2013 Surf Kayak World Championships. Self is a kayak instructor and kayak fishing expert, giving him yet another reason to think about ocean health. Bickley, a designer and artist, holds down the fort at Portland’s REI outdoor retail co-op.
They constantly push the limits of a 24-hour day, but don’t regret it. “Everything is scrambling and we never feel fully prepared,” says Self. “ There’s never a good time to start something. Do it anyway.”
Neil Schulman is a kayaker, photographer, writer and environmental advocate. You can see his work at www.neilschulman.com/neilschulman2. Learn more about Team OSOM at www.seatrash.blogspot.com or find them on Facebook.
This article appears in Adventure Kayak, Early Summer 2013. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.
This article originally appeared in Canoeroots and Family Camping magazine.
Four years ago, when then 15-year-old Angulalik Pedersen left Kugluktuk, Nunavut, to attend high school on full scholarship at Upper Canada College in Toronto, he brought with him a dream that one day he could take some of his southern classmates north to visit his hometown on the Arctic Ocean.
In the summer before Pedersen’s final year, with the help of his geography teacher at UCC and the Kitikmeot Inuit Association, he finally pulled it all together—a canoe trip on the Coppermine River that would end at his house on July 9, Nunavut Day.
The goal of the expedition—named Atanigi, “when two things come together” in the language of Kugluktuk—was to bring together Pedersen’s new classmates with youth from his home in the North. Because paddling is part of the extra-curricular program at UCC, Pedersen had no trouble drumming up interest for the trip in Toronto. Back home, however, extra- curricular activities involved powerboats, snow machines and ATVs…but not canoes.
With the infectious enthusiasm of Kugluktuk High School counselor cum recruitment officer Kenny Taptuna, however, half a dozen northern youth signed up. They found a canoe and the will to start learning strokes. Unfortunately, it was May and nearly everything was still frozen. As a result, when the group gathered as a whole for the first time on Air Tindi’s wharf in Yellowknife, half had no real paddling experience on flatwater, let alone preparation for whitewater.
Incredibly, the northerners surmounted their inexperience with natural athleticism and a seemingly near-genetic familiarity with boats in general. Aided by the skill and determination of three wilder- ness guides, the group practiced strokes and maneuvers on the first hundred or so kilometers of calm water near the Northwest Territories/Nunavut border.
By the time the crew turned north at Big Bend and started into the current and class II–III rapids for which the Coppermine is known, cross-cultural paddling teams were working like reasonably well-oiled machines. On the more difficult rapids, lead guide Colin Smith lashed two canoes together to make a pontoon boat— a.k.a. the “party barge”—which created a super stable, almost relaxing whitewater experience for novice paddlers.
At the Coppermine campsites, Taptuna taught nightly lessons in Inuit language and traditional games. Others started string games, throat singing lessons and impromptu inukshuk-building workshops. Traditions from the north and south blended in the common experience of paddling to the Arctic Ocean under the midnight sun.
When the paddlers arrived cold, wet and happy in Kugluktuk on Nunavut Day, they were celebrated for coming together to accomplish something remarkable. Pedersen and the other northerners were recognized by the town as the first people ever from that community to arrive via the river.
Equally significant was the realization of one young person’s dream to make this land just a little bit smaller by bringing people together in canoes.
James Raffan hopes paddlers will be inspired by Pedersen’s example to use their canoes to connect with their country and each other. Don’t forget: National Canoe Day is june 26, www.nationalcanoeday.net. American canoeists are encouraged to celebrate as well.
This article appeared in Canoeroots & Family Camping, Late Summer 2011.
Montana’s Doug Ammons has a paddling résumé that reads like a life list of rivers. Best known for a generation of pushing the boundaries of class V expeditionary whitewater, Ammons pioneered first self-supported (with Rob Lesser) and solo descents of the Grand Canyon of the Stikine, as well as descents of the Yukon’s Alsek River, Alaska’s Susitna and many other seldom-paddled rivers. Also a psychologist and author of The Laugh of the Water Nymph, Ammons has made another first descent of sorts—whitewater paddling literature. His newest book, Whitewater Philosophy explores the deeper meaning gained from a lifetime of paddling difficult rivers (available from Water Nymph Press, 2009, dougammons.com).
One of your overriding intentions is to try to capture the whitewater experience in words. Why is there a need to articulate this experience and put it into words?
There is no need to articulate what the experience means beyond my own desire to understand, and my own sense of clarity and inspiration. It’s important to me as a personal process, but I don’t presume that it is important to others. The sport is action-oriented, even hyper-action-oriented, rather than reflective—so most people get all the pleasure and understanding they want when they get on the water with their friends.
Is there something inherent in paddling that limits its written interpretation?
Yes. For most people, action is the meaning. They want to be immersed directly in the water; they aren’t interested in reflecting on it. If they were reflective, it would create a meditative, even mystical, approach to experiencing one of the great powers of the world—but mostly [the experience] doesn’t seem to be that deep.
As far as writing goes, the problem to solve is: how does one make these experiences accessible to everybody? Beyond that, how do you infuse the writing with the energy and power felt in the river, stated so it infuses any reader with the same inspiration?
You write often about the incredible gifts to be found paddling whitewater rivers, especially from your experience on extremely difficult rivers. Is that where the gifts are?
The door is always open to everybody. However, the more intense experiences create more vivid and dramatic images. They cut deeper and people seem to find them more interesting.
I think it is a fallacy that class V will teach you everything. If it did, there would be a lot of wise kayakers out there. But take it from me, the class V dudes are as weird and quirky and as messed up as anybody, and no wiser.
To paddle hard whitewater, all it really takes is a lot of motivation, physical skill, time in the boat, some aptitude for understanding water and a desire to do hard things. It is goal-oriented, which leads to trying to capture the goal rather than to understand living it. None of these are qualities that reward you with gifts. It takes a humbler state of mind to recognize gifts.
Are these gifts free for all who paddle?
I think there are probably different grades of experience as the stakes get higher, but the gifts are there for everybody. Interestingly, in my experience, most beginners and intermediates are more aware of the gifts and are better at expressing them than are the highly experienced, professional kayakers. They have a freshness, humbleness and excitement that [make them open to] inspiration.
The only problem is that most people tend to leave the message on the river, when it’s actually a profound life-encompassing perspective—a lesson that potentially affects everything they do. It’s up to you to apply [the lesson] in a meaningful way beyond your paddling, or to see that your paddling has brought you a gift that is rich beyond the river.
So what are these gifts?
The river gives beauty, danger, risk, excitement and challenge, and we answer with motivation, skills, control and action. These things are all very compelling [in and of] themselves, but more than that they are doorways [framing] something beyond themselves. In this sense the river is like a Zen master pointing at the moon. We paddlers are the disciples—some of us are just staring at his finger and some are aware he is pointing at something greater and far beyond us. If you are able to use the awareness difficult paddling gives you as a tool in the rest of your life, especially for understanding yourself, then that is something worthy of the gift the river has given.
Jeff Jackson is a professor of Outdoor Adventure at Algonquin College in Pembroke, Ontario.
This article originally appeared in Rapid, Spring 2010. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.
