Jon Bowermaster: The Ocean Ambassador

Stories

Photo: Fiona Stewart — Jon Bowermaster: The Ocean Ambassador

In January 2008, journalist Jon Bowermaster travelled to the Antarctica Peninsula to complete the final leg of his Oceans 8 expedition, a quest to explore all of the world’s continents by sea kayak. The Oceans 8 trips included Alaska’s Aleutian Islands (1999), Vietnam (2001), French Polynesia’s Tuamotu Atolls (2002), South America’s Altiplano (2003), Gabon (2004), Croatia (2005), Tasmania (2006) and Antarctica (2008).

Did you know that Oceans 8 was going to take 10 years when you started?
No I had no idea. When we went to the Aleutians it was just a pure, one-off adventure. It wasn’t until we’d done the second one, Viet- nam, that I thought that we should make this a long-term thing.

So how did you come up with the idea?
I was inspired by my climbing friends who had such simple and easily defined goals. I wanted some long-term project. Visiting each continent by sea kayak seemed pretty easy to me. At a sea- level way it’s our own kind of Seven Summits.

Why kayaking?
I’ve always regarded kayaks as our ambassadors. They open doors that wouldn’t open if we arrived by land. Along the coastlines virtually everyone we meet lives and depends on the sea. Everyone has a boat. Most of them are fishermen. So they don’t look at us like freaks, they look at us like brethren. Other than the Altiplano, no one ever said, “What are you doing here?”

So in South America you were just freaks?
We were dragging kayaks through the driest place on earth. The few people we did meet had never seen a kayak before. We’d rigged them on these little pull carts and harnesses. This is a place where people still believe in UFOs and extraterrestrials, so they’d see us come trundling across the desert and literally in some instances ran and hid.

In Antarctica you came across a sinking ship?
By pure coincidence when we had to drop the kayaks off in advance and I was riding on the National Geographic Endeavor, a big tourist ship, we were first on the scene of that sinking ship, the Explorer. We picked up the captain and the staff and all the Zodiacs. The captain had a guy with him who was carrying three bags—one was filled with all the passports, one was filled with the ship’s papers and one was filled with cash.

What’s next?
We’re going to South America and then Af- rica next month and the Galapagos and back to French Polynesia for other assignments.

Who’s “we”?
Fiona Stewart, my partner, travels with me, takes a lot of the pictures. She did all of the communication management from Antarctica. That’s the other part of this modern day adventuring is that it’s a lot of work. Every day you’ve got to download the images, edit the images, write the text, edit little videos.

Do you have a favourite place?
I’ve been back to French Polynesia and the Tuamotus many, many times. That might be my favourite. In a sense it’s more raw than some of the other places in that you can find people living very simply and not so removed from how their predecessors did, and it’s just incredibly beautiful.

What’s keeping you going?
Now that we’ve figured this website out and have gotten an audience that keeps checking in you really just want to keep sharing these kinds of stories—water-related and environmental-related.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.

Editorial: Apologies to Everyone I’ve Left in my Wake

Stories

Photo: Ryan Creary — Editorial: Apologies to Everyone I've Left in my Wake

“That looks like a good place to rest,” said Jacques Cousteau, while Mario Andretti and I pretended not to listen and continued our race to the campsite.

“Must keep going,” we grunted time and again. “No time to stop. Rest later.”

I am an inveterate impatient traveller. On my most recent kayaking trip I justified my abysmal behaviour by telling myself that Cousteau just preferred to paddle slowly and check out the sights while the rest of us charged forward. Surely he enjoyed shortcutting a kilometre offshore (which is why we secretly nicknamed him “Jacques Cousteau”) while we explored along the shore and waited for him at every headland. Of course, I never bothered to ask “Cousteau” how he felt.

It didn’t sink in how terribly I’d behaved until I was reading a blog, weeks later. Wendy Killoran and Rene Seindal are kayakers from different countries who tried, and bitterly failed, to paddle together around Sardinia last fall. Rene’s blog entry about what went wrong contemplates the importance of information sharing, mutual respect and patience that are integral to any expedition partnership.

Rene also slams the ultimate in disrespectful behaviour, “mock waiting.” Mock waiting means waiting just long enough for a slower paddler to get within a comfortable distance, then taking off before he has a chance to fully catch up and rest. I guiltily realized I knew exactly what Rene was talking about.

“Mock waiting is very destructive behaviour in a team,” Rene writes. It constantly underlines that ‘I’m faster and you’re slower,’ while it wears the slower paddler down physically too. It can drive the slower paddler into the ground, physically and psychologically.”

It further occurred to me that leaving someone in your wake highlights and abuses a power imbalance. Once you get far ahead of someone, it can be almost impossible for them to catch up unless you let them. Slowness gets compounded by wind and cur- rent, so a slower paddler will fall increasingly far behind and effectively be paddling farther through the water to get to the same destination. In other words, just as the rich get richer, the slow get slower.

I decided I don’t ever want to cause a Jacques Cousteau dynamic again. So I phoned for some expert advice from SKILS guiding school in Ucluelet, B.C. Instructor J.F. Marleau told me what should have been obvious. He said that when paddling with peers, you should first carefully choose partners with matching abilities, then make sure everybody has the same expectations for the trip, and communicate about any issues that arise.

A good way to do this is to start with a trip contract, which means sitting down with everyone before you leave to reach consensus on issues like how fast to travel, when and where to take rest breaks, what paddling conditions are unsafe, what to do if the group gets separated, how to communicate and resolve problems, and anything else that anyone in the group wants to lay down as a ground rule.

On my next trip I’m going to make a contract, and clause number one will be about paddling speed. I can already look back and remember all sorts of problems that this would have avoided. Like the first long paddling trip with my wife when we realized halfway through that only one of us cared at all about how far we paddled each day (hint: she wasn’t the one measuring the map distances with dental floss in the tent each night).

And while I’m at it maybe I’ll work on being a better communicator at home and at work. Because good expedition behaviour is really no different from good behaviour in everyday life. Nobody can be perfect, but a kayaking trip has a powerful way of showing you where to improve.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.

Boat Review: The Eighteen5 Sport by Delta Kayaks

Photo: Dave Aharonian — Boat Review: The Eighteen5 Spot by Delta Kayaks

Challenging the stereotype of what kind of kayaks you can make out of heat-moulded plastic, Delta Kayaks embodies all the ambition of a rock star stretching to compose a symphony. This company’s not stopping at the usual plastic rec and light-touring kayaks, no way. Its fleet includes a greenland-style performer, a 20-foot tandem, and even this—a true expedition-worthy long boat.

SPECS

length: 18 ft 6 in (5.6 m)

width: 23.5 in (59 cm)

depth: 12.25 in (31 cm)

cockpit: 18 x 32.5 in (46 x 83 cm)

weight: 57 lbs (25.9 kg)

volume: 121.9 gal (461.4 l)

dry storage: 67.6 gal (256.2 l)

MSRP: $2,750 Cdn

Reminiscent of fibreglass stalwarts like the Current Designs expedition and Seaward Quest, only wider, the eighteen5 Sport is the station wagon of the Delta fleet, a true cargo hauler with a stratospheric 256 litres of dry storage—the deeper eighteen5 Expedition has 24 litres more and fits larger paddlers. either boat will carry enough to paddle for a whole season without resupply.

There are at least two reasons why nobody has built such a long single kayak out of thermoformed plastic until now. The first we’ll get into later. The second is that thermoform is more flexible than other materials, so it’s harder to mould longer designs.

To overcome this, Delta has added a stiffener to the inner hull, an arched piece of plastic that extends along the keel from the bow hatch to the stern hatch. When we slammed the eighteen5 into large, steep wind waves, slight vibrations ran from our bums through to our neoprene-clad toes, but the stiffener kept the boat intact.

The convenient, oversized hatches were perfectly dry. We did notice some leakage around the seam of the rear bulkhead, allowing water to enter from the cockpit. however, Delta Kayaks says this leak has been eliminated in newer versions by adding a tighter-fitting bulkhead and modifications to the gluing.

The eighteen5 has a very comfortable cockpit with a sliding, fore-aft adjustable seat. The cruising speed is decent for a boat of its length. Performance is nonetheless nimble; it’s got quite a bit of rocker and it’ll about-face on an aggressive tilt much faster than you can say “Delta has tested its plastic to withstand re- peated hammer blows.”

all this capacity and performance comes in a beautifully finished package with the high- gloss appearance of gel coat and standard features you won’t find on boats from other companies—recessed foam grab handles, divots in the deck to make it easy to grab the bungies, paddle float straps, and more.

Which brings us to the second reason that nobody has built boats like this before: because it’s unknown if anybody will buy them. The mass market wants plastic rec boats while expedition paddlers—relatively few in number from the start—have always gravitated to pricey composites like bikers to leather. however, with expedition capacity, great touring performance and good looks at an attractive price, the eighteen5 may be one to break the mould.

Boat Review: Pyranha’s Rev

Photo: Jensen Klatt — Boat Review: Pyranha's Rev

There’s been a revolution in playboat design the last couple of years. Designers have ever-increasing demands to create boats that are easy for the novice market to make bounce, roll and spin and for the pros to get huge air. And you can’t just let them eat cake when the proletariat cries for an affordable and single kayak that does it all. So even as a freestyler, river running must be saved from the guillotine in design.

Pyranha’s new Rev takes it full circle, offering a small, medium and medium-long version, each with a Bastille-sized list of alterations to their 4-20 design to create a kayak that could make heads roll at the World Freestyle Championships in 2009. Although as purebred as freestyle kayaks come these days, Pyranha designer Graham Mackereth knew his boat had to appeal to both the expert and beginner paddler and he wanted a kayak that transitioned seamlessly from the biggest features to smallest rivers.

The wheels started turning on the Rev with some more obvious hull tweaks. Mackereth started with a far more symmetrical shape than Pyranha paddlers will be used to and moved the cockpit forward, giving the Rev a high-volume centre for lots of pop.

According to Mackereth, it is the full-length, releasing Vortex rails that allow great flat spinning. He says with a flat aft hull section and softer radius in the centre and front sections, you should find edge-to-edge transitions quick and require little effort. It feels snappier to carve but edgier for sitting and spinning, sort of like the Crazy 88, but not that edgy. The chined stern helps cut drag, adding to the Rev’s speed on a wave, which Pyranha has always been known for.

If you look closely you’ll also see Mackereth kept rolling by giving the Rev what he says are slicier ends than his previous models—oh, the forgotten joy of endless cartwheels—and finer edges will give better initiation for your other arsenal of tricks.

In late fall of ’07 the Rev made its first rounds out of the factory and around the world of official test rivers. In the hands of instructors at North Carolina’s Nantahala Outdoor Center, it impressed so much that they placed an order.

“It’s a boat that should make people look and feel better than they really are,” says NOC paddling school Director Wayne Dickert, so of course the Rev is being added to the school’s instructional fleet.

“The Rev proved to release faster, pop bigger and carve easier than any boat Pyranha has designed thus far,” says NOC store manager and boat buyer Daniel Dutton. “I especially loved initiating this boat in a hole or wave to go airborne and connected multiple tricks with control and ease.”

Keep in mind these fellows are pros, for the rest of us who take a little more time to get comfortable in a new boat, the finer points of the design may not be as obvious right away.

“It’s easy to roll, loop and flat spin if paddled aggressively; a good paddler should really be able to get the best from Rev,” Mackereth says. “But like any top-end boat, it does take a few paddles to get really dialed in. A quick test might not reflect its ultimate potential.”

One thing pros and recreational paddlers agreed upon was the Pyranha Connect 30 outfitting. The system is comfortable and easy enough to adjust, however some testers found themselves continually re-adjusting loose fittings. This does not outweigh just how responsive and forgiving the Rev truly is—two traits that have served monarchs and one English boat designer very well in the past.

SPECS

LENGTH: 6’ 1”/6’ 2”/6’ 3.5”
WIDTH: 23.5”/24”/24.4”
VOLUME: 46.2/53.1/56.8 US Gal
WEIGHT: N/A/31.4/N/A lbs
MRSP: $1,159 US
pyranha.com

This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great boat reviews, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.

Primal Instinct

Trips

From where I rested in a cliffside coyote den, my shotgun across my knees, I could see out across a yawning Owyhee Canyon. At the bottom, running thin and ragged, was the river itself. A guy could read the river like a book from high up on the canyon wall, but it was just jagged Braille down at water level. We’d spent six autumn days in this canyon in southeastern Oregon, canoeing nearly 100 kilometres of rocky riverbed from Rome to Birch Creek and, frankly, were having a hard time of it.

Running low in its boney bed, the high desert stream rattled through narrow clefts and boulder-studded channels. Each rapid we came across—and there were many—commanded us to pull ashore and scout. We ran a few and played safe with the rest, lining anything that looked dicey or gathering all six of us to hump our bloated hulls over spots where the boulders were just too close together.

Canoes had turned out to be the right choice of boat—rafts would be difficult to work through the boulder fields and inflatable kayaks don’t slip over rocks as well as hard Royalex—but our two 16-footers were nearly too big for the Owyhee this late in the season. We paid the price in busted thwarts, deep gouges and more grooves than a vinyl 45. Though still stable, the nearly lame Duck Hunter had to have its gunwales lashed together to make the distance.

After days of paddling, carrying, hiking, hunting and fishing we would huddle in the sand around a crackling fire, turning like flapjacks every few minutes to warm our backs or bellies. Solace seeped from a bottle of Bushmills we passed around while the water in our canteens froze up tight.

Though the river here runs through one of the least-populated regions in the lower 48, we were far from alone. Chukar partridge were thick as fleas on a cat and hanging low to the water. They live in the scree and rimrock on the canyon walls. We would routinely round a corner and find a covey of birds staring us down from the bank. It was an incongruous sight to see our hunters slip onto the earth-tone shore and give chase in their neon dry suits and PFDs.

Not having packed any dinners, we ate what we could shoot. Abandoned mines upstream had left a leeching legacy of mercury in the fish, so I knew what I wanted on my plate. Hiking out of camp with my shotgun on my back, I was looking for dinner no less earnestly than the eagle hunting his mouse. The alignment of function with purpose, of hunting to eat, was a powerful motivator. Granted, we hadn’t the predatorial focus of true canyon denizens like the coyote and the osprey; ours was a mere patch on the fabric of the primal imperative of hunting to survive. The satisfaction of feeding myself directly from the river canyon I was travelling through, without a thousand middlemen and miles between nature and my plate, brought me closer to a leaner style of life.

The den I was resting in was littered with small bones, fur and coyote scat. I fingered through the sand thinking I might turn up an arrowhead or chippings. I could imagine a hunter of long ago ducking in to escape the weather.

To the north I could see a thin plume of smoke rising from camp, which meant Cookie (he’s better at cooking than we are at giving nicknames) was firing up coals for the Dutch oven. Last I had counted we were a few birds short of a meal; it was time to get the two partridge tucked in my game pouch back to camp. I got up stiffly, shut the breech of my gun and looked for the best route to scramble down the ridge.

I could feel dinner pressing against my lower back as I hiked. In the distance, downriver, an old jeep trail scratched down from the rim, one of only two tracks leading into the canyon sanctum on this stretch. On a flat along the river two trucks were parked at a camp.

I’ve camped on rivers that way many times, driving in without worrying about tying gear to thwarts, pinning canoes against rocks and sustaining lower back pain. But we were on the Owyhee to feed ourselves from the land, not from a drive-through lane. Better to do that from a canoe than a truck. Headed toward the half-broken canoe on the bank I had a feeling the birds in my pouch would taste better than the ones the guys in the trucks had taken, even if they had bagged a few extra birds while we had our guns tucked away and our paddles out.

Rob Lyon is the author of ‘Water Marked: Journal of a Naked Fly Fisherman’ and lives on a small island off the Washington coast.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

Finding Farley

Stories

Karsten Heuer and Leanne Allison are no strangers to long expeditions. But their last undertaking to cross the country by paddle, sail and train to meet an iconic writer quickly took the form not of an expedition but a pilgrimage.

For writer Heuer and filmmaker Allison, the story began in 2005 when Heuer sent an unsolicited draft of his book Being Caribou to Farley Mowat. As childhood devotees of the 86-year-old writer the couple was amazed a few weeks later when Mowat called and invited them to visit his Cape Breton farm. Living in Canmore, Alberta, Heuer and Allison weighed the options for getting there. Then they realized that Mowat had already written a multi-volume guidebook for them: Why not plot a route over land and water, criss-crossing the settings of Mowat’s books?

And so the Finding Farley project was born. Last May, Allison, Heuer and their two-year-old toddler Zev loaded up their Prospector and dropped it into the Bow River near their home.

The early stretch of their journey had the family paddling through the setting of Owls in the Family and The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be, two of Mowat’s novels about growing up in the Saskatchewan prairies.

By summer, they were deep into the northern wilds, battling long portages, a thick haze of bugs and a near-miss with a sleeping polar bear.

They followed the Cochrane and Thlewiaza Rivers through Manitoba into Nunavut, passing the barren settings of several of Mowat’s books, including No Man’s River and Lost in the Barrens.

“Farley remembers being terrified running these rivers with his life in the trapper’s hands,” says Allison. “He knows how unforgiving the landscape can be.”

From Churchill, Manitoba, they caught a train to Quebec and then sailed across the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Newfoundland. After three days on the choppy seas they pulled into Burgeo, the setting for Mowat’s 1972 novel A Whale for the Killing.

In early fall, the family sailed to Nova Scotia and anchored in the bay at St. Peters, where Mowat stood waiting on the shore.

Despite having never met, the group soon fell into easy rapport. “There was already such a shared history,” says Allison. “It felt more like a reunion than an introduction.”

The family spent three days exchanging tales from the Barren Lands with the Mowats. Mowat admitted being worried throughout the family’s pilgrimage, despite—or perhaps because of—his own extensive travels across the same land.

“He had tried a few times along the way to dissuade us,” says Allison. “So he was very happy to finally have us safely ashore.”—Amy Flynn Stuart

This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

Family Pictures

Photo: Scott MacGregor — Family Pictures

I think I was seven when all my parents, uncles, aunts, siblings, cousins and I shuffled into a small main street studio. It was a stuffy low-ceilinged room lined with benches, strobes and an autumn-scene canvas backdrop.

The family portrait, commissioned by my grandparents, still hangs in their hallway, a reminder to me to never dress up a skinny seven-year-old boy and his extended family and stand them in front of a two-dimensional, neutral-grey-toned wilderness and expect them to look natural.

Portraiture, in the art world, happens when a painter depicts the visual appearance of his subjects. Just about any photograph does this, but a true portrait is more than that. A true portrait captures the essence or personality of the subject, not just a physical likeness. Think of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, perhaps the most famous painting of all time. Without that smile she’d just be another Wal-Mart portrait.

For this issue’s feature I asked our regular Family Camping photographers for tips on taking pictures for family albums. There were a few technical camera tips for making better photographs but most of the suggestions had nothing to do with buttons on the camera. Great outdoor portraits are more about natural environments, props, and simply standing back, and letting inner essences bubble to the surface.

Some of my favourite family portraits simply capture a moment in time. Like our first cross-country ski trip; skinny dipping in the river; or the smile on my daughter’s face with her first mouthful of roasted marshmallow. Time stops for no man. But I can hang a fraction of a second of it on my wall.

Other pictures I’m excited to show my kids in 10 or 20 years. I want to show them what they were too young or too busy to remember. I want to show them who they were. It’s one thing to tell them they loved jumping in puddles, it is another to show them mid-air and screaming.

And, there’s legacy. My legacy. My vain and backslapping ego wants my kids to know just how cool their good ol’ dad really is (or at least was). I actually grew my hair and beard, so they’d have photos of us together like this. I hope by digging through old shoeboxes of pictures (or scanning through DVDs) they’ll see just how much their parents love them. Never before have parents had the luxury of spending as much time with our kids as this generation. I want them to see the adventures we had while raising them.

When I was growing up my parents, like most of their generation, were busy. Cameras and film were expensive, and not very handy to use—flash used to come in disposal cubes. Consequently, there are only a few cherished pictures of me, and even fewer of my younger brother.

After three years of parenthood I have more than 2,400 family photos on my laptop. Only a couple are as good as those taken by our pros. A few more are special enough to hang in our hallway. But I guarantee you this, not a single one has an unnatural smile in front of a fake forest background.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

Skills: Fast and Fresh Dinner

Skills

Photo: Ian Merringer — Skills: Fast and Fresh Dinner

By day 10 on the Coppermine last year, even the non-fishers were angling for pan-fried char. But how exactly does that slippery critter get from your hook to the plate? Filleting a fish removes the flesh from the bones and makes cooking easier.

Fillet your fish on a flat rock or piece of wood away from the campsite and near the water’s edge so you can rinse away the evidence.

Using a sharp, long, thin blade, slice just behind the gills to the spine as if you were removing the head. Then make an incision along the back of the fish, as close as you can to the dorsal fin. You should be able to feel the dorsal bones, which protrude from the spine, with the tip of your blade. If you can’t feel the dorsal bones, you’re leaving some flesh behind.

Hold the flesh back as you slice and continue until you’ve cut down to the spine all the way from gills to the anal fin. This is where the ribcage ends and you can begin cutting deeper than the spine. With your blade angled down toward the spine continue with a sawing motion to separate the tail portion of the fillet from the spine.

With the fillet detached—except for where flesh meets ribcage—repeat on the other side, cutting to the spine on the other side of the dorsal fin and bones.

The hardest part is removing the fillet from the ribcage. While holding the flesh you’ve already separated and with the blade angled down toward the ribs, gradually slice the flesh away from the bones. The flesh is thinnest over the ribcage but with patience you can get most of the meat from these bones. When you get to the end of the ribs slice along the belly and around the anal fin and anus to remove the first fillet. Repeat on the other side and you’ll have two fillets ready for the pan and a very thin fish that can go back to a deep spot in the lake.

You can cook fillets with the skin on but I prefer to remove the skin from fish with large scales. Hold the fillet near the tail with the skin down and slice between the skin and the flesh. Work the knife back and forth with the blade on a slight angle toward the skin. The skin will neatly part from the flesh, leaving you with nothing but fresh flesh and very few bones.

Mark Scriver is a Black Feather guide and the co-author of Camp Cooking.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

Betcha Didn’t Know About…Aurora Borealis

Stories

Photo: istockphoto.com/Shauni — Betcha Didn't Know About...Aurora Borealis

The aurora borealis, also called the northern lights, occur when charged particles collide with atoms of oxygen and nitrogen 80 kilometres above the earth’s surface. Enough collisions result in a release of light energy, in a process similar to that in a fluorescent light bulb.
In an early nod to multiculturalism, the aurora borealis were named after the Roman goddess of dawn and the Greek god of the north wind.
Displays of the aurora borealis are most often observed within a 2,500-kilometre radius of the magnetic North Pole—not the true North Pole.
The lights were once known as “herring flashes” in Scandinavia where people believed the atmospheric glow was caused by light being reflected off schools of fish.
Don’t believe those who say they’ve heard the aurora borealis. Physicists say the lights make no sound, since they occur in the vacuum of space.
Northern Lights was the name of a group of Candian singers that raised $3.2 million in 1985 for famine relief with the sale of their single Tears Are Not Enough. The group featured luminaries such as Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and, um, the guy from Loverboy.
Aurora borealis are most commonly observed around the equinoxes, when sunspots are most common.
Suspicious Russian men once associated the lights with a dragon that seduced women in the absence of their husbands.
Curtain-like waves of the aurora borealis always follow an east-to-west pattern.
Aurora Borealis is a European record label. Their corporate motto is: “We who live on the edge of the Earth…have to this day been protected by our remoteness and by the mystery and fear created by our name.” They have yet to sign a polka artist.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Canoeroots Magazine.

Online Learning

Skills

Attempting class IV and V whitewater is an exciting and major step in a paddler’s progression, best carried out under the tutelage of good mentors and skilled paddlers. As this transition can be one of the most difficult and potentially dangerous periods of a kayaker’s development toward more advanced challenges, good advice and quality instruction can save you some hard knocks. In my own paddling career, I had the good fortune of having a mentor in Oregon kayaking pioneer Eric Brown. From paddling with Eric I learned some of the most important river-running tips—tips I rely on whenever I am most concerned with paddling the cleanest lines.

Keep Your Eyes on the Prize

The bigger the water and the longer the rapids, the more forces there will be to push you off your line. Keeping your eyes ahead of the next move, or ideally two or three moves ahead, will allow you to better anticipate what’s coming next and have well-planned, and therefore, better-placed strokes. Steeper water moves faster so the habit of looking ahead to identify where you want to go will in essence slow things down, giving you more time to react. Combine this with sound paddle technique, namely keeping an entire blade in the water and good forward stroke mechanics and you have potentially the most important skill for tackling higher gradient.

Keep Your Strokes Forward

One of the most common sights instructors see when introducing kayakers to more advanced whitewater is the classic deer-in-the-headlights effect. This phenomenon is easily identified by a tense, uncertain or fearful expression, slight paddle dips from a horizontally oriented paddle, and a slouched or stiffened torso, depending on the paddler’s level of anxiety. Maintaining a good forward stroke, planted well forward, forces you into an aggressive stance. Extending your forward-reaching hand by opening your torso further streamlines your body toward oncoming whitewater, allowing you to punch holes and waves more effectively. It also puts your paddle in the ideal position to be planted into the downstream current.

Mind the Prerequisites

Take note that the first step mentioned is the presence of a skilled mentor or instructor. Find someone you trust to introduce you to big whitewater, but more importantly, find someone who really knows how to paddle. It should be a given that if a kayaker has good technique, he or she has put the time in to develop that technique, and will have the experience to show you the ropes safely. Beware of the self-proclaimed expert; take a look at their resume first! If you need to, hire a good instructor. Their dedication to the sport will assure that you are getting good feedback. Sequentially, make sure your technique is sound and that you have the experience to move up in class, not just the guts. Making subtle improvements to your forward stroke should be an obsession and perfecting new strokes should always be a consideration. Finally, to do it right, paddle flat-water or slalom gates in your creek boat or river runner to develop technique and control. This is especially true if you are a weekend warrior or need to mentally and physically prepare for a tough run, but nothing besides the real thing can provide for a more appropriate workout, or headspace.

This article on big water paddling was published in the Spring 2008 issue of Rapid magazine.

This article first appeared in the Spring 2008 issue of Rapid Magazine.