A sea kayaker look on as big waves crash against a rocky shore.
Rough conditions call for advanced sea kayaking paddling techniques such as bracing, surfing and rolling, right? Not so fast. Long before those skills are needed, you need to concentrate on flexing from the waist.
When paddling over an oncoming wave, the bow climbs the wave face, crests it and continues down the far side. Adjusting to the change in your boat’s angle as the bow tilts upward and then downward is very natural. You simply lean forward and backward from the waist, keeping the upper body in a neutral position while the kayak rides over the wave. Your head stays over the centreline of the kayak and stability is maintained.
Leaning forward or backward in a kayak this way comes naturally, but flexing edge to edge is far more counterintuitive—and important. If you stay rigid at the waist when waves hit broadside and the boat tilts on edge, your upper body and head will lean over the centreline, throwing you off balance.
To keep the boat stable, your waist needs to stay supple and operate like a universal joint, allowing the kayak to tilt freely in all directions, keeping the upper body and head centred over the boat. By flexing at the waist, you let the kayak and lower body move as one unit, independent from the upper body. The ability to maintain this co-operative division between upper and lower body is what separates upright paddlers from those with well-practiced self-rescue techniques.
Remaining relaxed in choppy conditions is the key to staying flexible and supple. Breathe deeply and drop those shoul- ders, relieving any built up tension. Focus on a nice comfort- able breathing rhythm and match it to the pace of your strokes.
Paddling in calm water while rolling your hips (and the kayak) from side to side is a good way to warm up and be sure you’ll remember your waist’s full range of motion when you need to call on it for stability.
Think of relaxing your hips and waist as a skill in the same category as bracing, surfing and rolling; they all take time to develop. Whether it takes buying a hula-hoop, taking up belly dancing or simply stretching more often, get those hips loosened up, and remember to use them.
Alex Matthews keeps his hips doing their thing while guiding kayaking trips in B.C. and Baja.
This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2005 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
“Lookin’ for adventure, and whatever comes our way.” –Steppenwolf| Photo: Daniel Stewart
Ben Shillington is the mastermind of what he calls skid trips—short, dirtbag adventures that he does at least once a year between real expeditions. Skid trips have rules, Ben tells me over a basket of half-price (of course) wings and a few beers.
“The most limiting or freeing factor is that they must be to a faraway place on the cheapest of budgets—a minimum drive of 65 hours and at a maximum cost of $250.” Ben’s gear must fit in or strap to a 35-liter daypack and skid trip research can only be by word of mouth. Skid trips apparently often involve Greyhound buses, a healthy dose of hitchhiking, sleeping in snow caves on the edge of resort towns and finishing plates of food left on the bar.
“Lookin’ for adventure, and whatever comes our way.” –Steppenwolf | Photo: Daniel Stewart
The skid tripper is 22 years old and is living his dreams one crazy expedition at a time. I watched him teach mountain bike maintenance to a group of weekend warriors at a recent trade show. His shaggy hair and hooped earring hung below his wool beanie toque. On one wrist he wore a chunky Suunto mountaineer’s wrist computer and on the other a hemp bracelet he bought from a street vendor in Nepal when he was climbing Mount Everest for a Discovery Channel documentary.
He was on fire when he got to his chat on low cost tire repairs, “Try tying your tube in a knot and putting it back on your rim. It will be a bumpy ride, but you’ll get into town.” Ben knows. When he finished his outdoor adventure diploma at college he hopped on his bike and crossed Canada in 31 days, the hard way, east to west, into the wind and uphill.
I sat and listened to Ben’s plans, smiling, remembering when the passion for dirtbag adventure ran freely (free being the root word) through my own veins.
I told Ben about leaving the university bar one night 10 years ago, packing our aid climbing gear and heading, by headlamp, to the base of a nearby rock wall. The plan was to make the first pitch in the dark, sleep the night and complete the last two pitches at first light so we’d be back on campus for a philosophy exam by noon. No one could afford a proper portaledge to sleep on, so we made do with a borrowed hammock and a bathroom door we hauled up the rock face. Ben thought the door idea was brilliant. I told him he could use it anytime; it was still hanging there.
His next real expedition will come this summer when he climbs Mount McKinley, North America’s tallest peak. After that he’s back down to sea level where he’s making plans to be the first to circumnavigate by sea kayak the world’s largest islands—Borneo, Papua New Guinea, and Greenland.
I like the idea of paddling around Borneo, but I know I won’t bother trying it, not for a while anyway. If it were my highest priority, I’d find a way to do it. But, for Ben, paddling the world and eating Mr. Noodle for a week is his highest priority.
Live life large Ben Shillington, you’re on a path traveled by so many adventurers before you, some by foot, bike, canoe, horseback, thumb; others by hot air balloon, ski, camel and kayak. And Ben, don’t worry about growing out of your skid trips; true dirtbags don’t burn out or fade away, we just start to carry credit cards with membership benefits.
Recirc is a column celebrating our favorite stories from 20 years of Adventure Kayak, Rapid and Canoeroots. This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2005 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. Since this story was first published, Ben Shillington has fat biked to the South Pole and skied across Greenland.
In its debut on the slalom scene, the new Esquif Spark swept the 2004 US National Open Canoeing Championships on Montana’s Blackfoot River. It nabbed first, second, third and fourth places in the men’s solo rec class. With its duck-hunter camouflage Royalite shell, ash gunwales and radical cab-forward shape, the Spark is the fastest oxymoron in whitewater.
With Esquif Canoes sponsoring the last two US Nationals, it’s no surprise Esquif designer Jacques Chasse met John Kazimierczyk. Kazimierczyk is the designer, builder and coffee maker at Mill Brook Boats, specializing in compostite slalom canoes. The Spark is based on Kazimierczyk’s most successful design, the Ignitor. Chasse explains the minor differences: “The rec open canoe slalom class [for ABS canoes] doesn’t have a minimum length requirement, so we made the Spark 18 inches shorter. To keep the speed up we modified the transition and the rocker to accommodate the shorter length, without affecting the waterline.”
According to Kazimierczyk, the Spark is made for speed: “Paddling a canoe that allows you to move faster than the river, any time you want, is such a thrill.” He admits there are paddlers who say that the Spark is too long. “Too long for what?” Kazimierczyk asks. “It’s a perfect length for what it is meant to do.”
What makes the Spark so different (from a Rival, for example) is what Kazimierczyk calls his cab-forward design. He explains: “The Ignitor, like the Spark, has its widest waterline forward of the centre of the boat. The bow of the Ignitor sort of squashes the water as it moves through it. The narrower stern then follows in relatively undisturbed water. The paddler also sits slightly forward of the centreline, in the widest part of the boat. This makes entering a slalom gate slightly easier. The problem is you now have more stern behind you. It’s a trade off.”
Sitting forward of centre changes how you paddle the Spark. Forget a along forward stroke and stern pry combination; the Spark needs to be driven from the bow. Esquif team paddler Andrew Westwood explains: “The Spark responds so well to forward and cross-forward strokes that you don’t need to waste time with stern pries or even J strokes. It’s like paddling a C1.”
Besides changing stroke combinations, you need to learn how to use Spark’s edges. The hull is narrow with edges that aren’t as sharp as the Ococee and not as soft as the Rival. Engaging the outside edge of the Spark initiates both a change in direction and a transition to its other edge, in about the same amount of time it takes to cross the bow with your paddle – perfect. Using your edges to initiate a change in direction might be a new concept to many intermediate paddlers, but that’s only because they’ve been in boats that do it so poorly.
Is the Spark a winner? Three-time North American open canoe slalom champion Andrew Walker jumped in the Spark at last year’s US Nationals: “It accelerates quickly and carves gracefully through the eddies. It’s time to forget the speed-killing bob and eddying line spinout of my short boat.”
No doubt the Spark will be a popular choice for the fast and furious, but Esquif needs to be careful not to pigeonhole it in the slalom category. It could be just as popular for the bored intermediates in the eddies.
Solo open canoeing has been smoldering away for 10 years. While other manufacturers have tossed their wood in the fire pit, we know for an explosion you need a Spark.
This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great boat reviews, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.
If you visit the Atlantis Kayaks workshop, you’re apt to be under-whelmed when you see that it amounts to a small barn in a field near Nanaimo, B.C. Inside, however, the electricity meter is whirling like a dervish, driving heaters and floodlights and other apparatus of industrial boat production. The two-storey shed hums with the mounting intensity of pre-season orders, and you realize that this is what it looks like when big kayak companies get their start.
Atlantis Kayaks is Robin Thacker, a moulding expert who came to kayak building by happenstance. He once moulded parts for jet engines and has another business building scale models of multi-million dollar flight simulators. In his spare time he races bathtubs, but that story will have to wait for another review.
Thacker discovered kayaking when he moved to B.C. in the 1990s. As a builder, he wasn’t about to buy a boat from somebody else. He went ahead and designed his own, selling the Aurora design to Seaward five years later when he was through. But Thacker had caught the bug and in 2003 he started Atlantis Kayaks.
So, a novice kayaker designs his own kayak. At first this story sounds like the episode of The Simpsons where Homer gets to design a car for the common man. His tacky La Cucaracha air horn and shag carpeting didn’t catch on.
But Thacker is one outsider who knows the right way to bring fresh perspective to an industry. Why not add an integrated GPS system? Why not find a way to attach foot braces to a boat without drilling holes in the hull? And why not ask the outfitters what they want in a kayak and then build it for them?
On The Simpsons, Homer’s car cost $82,000 and bankrupted a company. In real life, the Thacker kayak is competitively priced and appears to be propelling Atlantis toward mainstream success.
The Titan VI is a low-volume version of Atlantis’ flagship Titan. It’s the Titan hull with a lower deck for a tighter fit and sportier feel. Our test confirmed what Atlantis’ outfitter customers already know: Titans are super-stable, beginner-friendly, roomy, durable and attractive.
Fully loaded, our Titan VI took a lot of work to flip over. It tracked easily and heavier paddlers could tilt it and shorten the waterline for tighter turns. We had a comfortable ride in 5-meter seas and 20-knot winds and felt relaxed enough while drifting to take photographs in conditions that would have made for white-knuckle paddling in many other boats.
The Titan VI is 24 inches wide but cruised for us at speeds similar to narrower kayaks of its length. “It’s not the width that determines speed,” the designer explains. “It’s the footprint.” Maybe that’s a bathtub-racing secret.
Medium to large paddlers seeking an expedition-capacity kayak should take a close look at the Titan VI. This is a classic North American-style design that excels in comfort, capacity and stability, with innovative construction and clever features that set it apart from the competition.
Unlike Homer Simpson’s bells and whistles, Robin Thacker’s extra features are intelligent and practical. Consider the unprecedented option of an integrated GPS cradle for $295 CAD (GPS not included).
Photos: Tim Shuff
The stiff fiberglass seat back provides great support, although it may get in the way during rescues.
Everything but the Super Big Gulp holder (middle)
Comfortable, padded thigh hooks and a low deck provide a sporty fit for a large-volume boat. The Werner foot rails operating the Feathercraft rudder screw into a moulded insert in the hull and connect to a strap offering a second foot adjustment that’s always within reach. We’d like to see a deeper, grooved cradle for the rudder on the rear deck to prevent the foot pedals from moving when the rudder isn’t in use.
Excellent detail work includes fiberglass-taped inner and outer seams and bulkheads; Kevlar-reinforced bow and stern; standard cockpit cover and optional underdeck mesh bags in the cockpit and rear hatch ($109.90 CAD).
Cucaracha proof and then some (bottom)
The 72-liter bow hatch and the 120-liter stern hatch (shown here) are sealed by a two-piece system of airtight neoprene with a flush fiberglass cover. D-rings allow paranoid paddlers to attach padlocks to their hatch buckles—a deterrent to anyone coveting the reserve gummy bear stash. A fishing rod, paddle or tripod could be stowed under the hatch bungees.
This article was first published in Adventure Kayak‘s Early Summer 2005 issue. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine’s print and digital editions here , or browse the archives here.
Some boat manufacturers try to please everyone. Impex has taken a different tack with the Outer Island. This new boat will be to Impex what so-called halo cars are to automakers—an outstanding specialty design that draws attention to an entire brand, whether or not it’s a big seller by itself.
The Outer Island already has a loyal following. Connecticut-based Greenland kayaker Jay Babina perfected the Outer Island over four years starting in 1995, and handmade wooden versions have since earned a reputation for being fast, stable and easy to scull, brace and roll. Impex sparked a buzz in the Greenland scene by announcing it would reproduce Babina’s design with only minor modifications.
The Outer Island’s West Greenland pedigree includes exceptionally low windage, low volume, a long waterline, minimal rocker and a slick pancake of a rear deck (only seven inches deep) to facilitate traditional techniques like layback rolls and balance braces. Impex has already signed Cheri Perry onto their team, a Greenland Kayaking Championships paddler who enthuses that this is the first composite kayak in which she can perform the majority of competition rolls.
Impex Outer Island Specs
Length: 18′
Width: 21.5″
Depth: 10″ (mid-ship), 7″ (rear deck)
Weight: 55 lbs glass
Total volume: 220 L
Total storage: 114 L
Cockpit: 30″ x 16″
MSRP: $2,695 USD glass
It remains a surprisingly dry ride while knifing blithely through steep and deep seas. Initial stability is unexpectedly good for such a narrow boat, surely due to the shallow-V cross section.
Unlike many Greenland designs that echo skin-on-frame lines, the Outer Island has a soft chine, which rolls very smoothly in a tilt from primary to secondary stability.
Even novices will be able to make the Outer Island track straight and win races. It’s very fast and has the unwavering temperament of a good sled dog, but it takes real skill to make it turn.
Where a hard-chine boat tilted on edge tends to carve all the way through an outside arc with little help from the paddler, the Outer Island veers ever so slightly, following its forward inertia unless you throw in a few sweeps to coax it around. It’s clear why Babina’s original design didn’t have a skeg. We only dropped ours once, during a difficult 15-knot rear quartering wind and large ocean swell.
Impex slots the Outer Island into their specialty touring category alongside its alter ego, the playfully rockered Susquehanna.
So what’s the specialty? The Outer Island is one of the best production boats for small to mid-sized paddlers for real Greenland paddling, racing and short-duration touring—at very competitive Impex prices. Add $200 CDN for an expedition layup, $600 for Kevlar and $1,000 for carbon Kevlar.
Bow to the king of logos (top)
The Impex name is said to derive from “import-export,” adopted when Mid-Canada Fiberglass was looking for a U.S. tag for
its Formula Kayaks line. Now, the moniker with the monarchical ring has conquered all and every new MCF kayak bears the Impex crown—three wave crests bejewelled by little kayaks and water droplets.
An eight-inch round cover allows access to the 48-litre front hatch. All deck fittings are recessed and the heavy-duty bungees are well laid out for paddle stowage on the front deck. Bow and stern toggles attach to a simple loop threaded through the end pours.
In the throne room (middle)
In the cockpit you’ll note the beefy construction: taped seams, reinforced keel, rigid fibreglass mat deck and funky semi-transparent fibreglass bulkheads curved to flex and absorb forces through the hull. High marks for outfitting too: Werner foot braces, padded thigh hooks and a comfortable, low-profile whitewater-style ratcheting backband with matching seat pad from Immersion Research.
The short, contoured seat felt a bit high to some testers, rising slightly in the middle where seats are typically bucket-shaped. A slider on the right controls the cable skeg. The low deck and thigh braces and short keyhole cockpit suit smaller paddlers, yet there’s still plenty of legroom for beanpoles well over six feet tall.
The Outer Island is quite suitable for tripping. Volume is larger than it looks, thanks to its 18-foot length, and performance is equally good with or without a load. Imagine endurance trips where you want to travel light and cover long distances in a few days or a week. We easily packed for four days, putting larger items through the oval rear hatch. All hatches are recessed with drains around the rims.
This article originally appeared in Adventure Kayak’s Early Summer 2005 issue. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine’s print and digital editions here, or browse the archives here.
Spencer Cox and Sean Allen stand on a moist ledge above a big drop in the steep Beauty Creek Canyon in Jasper National Park. It’s not the drop they’re concerned about so much as how the water below belches from the undercut.
Brock Wilson was thinking about the same thing in 1986 when he and, then Jasper local, Stuart Smith ran the drop. “I watched Stuart pencil in and get stuffed under the overhang,” Wilson remembers. “I wanted to land flatter, but I landed too flat and wrecked my back.” The waterfall became known around Jasper as Lumbarsis.
Eighteen years later, Spencer and Sean are weighing the pros and cons of boofing and compacted spines. Reflecting on the fortunes—and misfortunes—of the past is happening a lot around here these days.
Locals like Sean and Spencer, along with a handful of other paddlers born in, raised in, and forever tied to Jasper, are rediscovering its formerly-prized creeks and rivers and picking up where early kayaking pioneers left off.
Jasper, British Columbia: The second coming of a paddling town
As a birthplace of extreme kayaking in Canada, Jasper was as much an international whitewater destination in the 1980s as Squamish and Whistler are today. Paddlers can access at least 12 high-quality class III–V rivers within an hour of the national park’s tourist centre. Jasper offers everything from steep bouldery creeks to ledgy waterfall runs and big volume rivers.
In the 1990s, while playboating fervour engulfed North America, Jasper’s kayaking scene was caught in a whirlpool. The downward spiral began when Parks Canada closed a popular local river and accelerated with the death of a local paddler. Many paddlers had also reached a zenith in their paddling careers and shifted toward city life, chasing well-paying careers rather than first descents.
Feature photo: Ryan Creary
First descents were exactly what a group of Germans were looking for when they came to the Rockies with their boats in the late 1970s. In search of challenging Canadian rivers, members of the German Alpine Kayak Club had no clear idea of what they could run. The locals weren’t much help. Although skilled, the Jasper paddling scene was stuck mostly in fibreglass slalom boats.
The Germans were more interested in paddling class IV and V rivers than running gates. A vanguard film called Challenge the Canadian Rockies, produced in the early 1980s, featured these bearded kayakers, wearing wool sweaters and baby blue neoprene dropping 30-foot Overlander Falls accompanied by a symphonic score.
The falls look small compared to the steady stream of 60-footers on today’s techno-driven, small-boat paddle porn, but the Germans’ sense of adventure shook the locals out of their slalom slumber. Many started scouting the landscape with a magnifying glass, combing the mountains that surround Jasper and paddling everything they could. In 1982, a mixed-nationality team of Krauts and Canucks calling themselves the Suicide Six claimed the first descent of the cascading Bighorn River. The German blitzkrieg had succeeded. From the mid-80s to the mid-90s Jasper ranked high among world-class whitewater destinations.
Established as the National Park’s town in 1907, Jasper has long been a mixture of terra cotta souvenir-hocking buildings, 100 per cent genuine Alberta beef steakhouses and depression-era Parks Canada structures with faded cedar shake awnings. It hasn’t changed much since the Germans were here, except that now a McDonald’s restaurant stands brazenly in the middle of town. Tourists, it seems, are hungry for cheeseburgers after long days of discovery in the undisturbed scenery just outside town limits.
I’m leaning against the faux-log façade of McDonald’s when Sean Allen rolls up in his dented grey truck. With his pale complexion, fiery eyes and dark goatee, he looks like he belongs on the seat of a Harley. He traded in his motorcycle after hitting a bus. Now he throws himself off bus-sized pourovers instead.
On a motorcycle or in a kayak, Sean is a hard-living guy. He’s taken some big hits since he started paddling in 1999. During a one-week stretch, he took two of his most severe beatings. One of them happened on a high-water mission to the Bighorn when he landed slightly crooked under a waterfall. The river squashed him to the bottom as if being pressed to the pavement by the boot of a Hells Angel. That slowed him down for a while. His skill has since come to match his nearly fearless demeanour.
We leave the processed putridity of McNuggets behind to meet Spencer and take advantage of the long central Albertan day. Just five minutes outside town, the Maligne Canyon is the after-work creek run of choice. When I first came here a few days ago, the place was like an attraction at Disneyland. Swarms of tourists dangled themselves over the safety railings to capture a digital image of our show.
“Are these extreme kayakers?” inquired a voice from the mob. The eddy I paddled into certainly felt extreme. What should normally be a calm backwater was actually a boiling, spitting current. “There’s an underground cave system that drains Medicine Lake,” explained Sean as he watched me flail away. Cracks in the limestone walls fill the canyon about every 100 metres. The one-kilometre creek run starts out 10 feet wide, but by the end it’s a legitimate river.
We started running the canyon one drop at a time,” explains Spencer, the other prime mover behind Jasper’s himself. He tumbled around in the hole until he resurgence. “We ran the bottom drop one night then went home. Eventually we worked up to the class V Sickle. Now we run the canyon every night. I’ve probably run it a thousand times.” I assume he’s exaggerating, but his detailed knowledge of every rock and eddy tells me he’s not.
I think back to two days earlier when Spencer led us to a put-in that was crawling with signs of grizzlies, banging his boat with his paddle and brushing sun-bleached hair out of his eyes. Though he doesn’t let grizzlies keep him from paddling, Parks Canada has been a little more troublesome.
Just upstream of the canyon is one reason why Jasper’s kayaking scene went south. A steep and technical run flows between Maligne and Medicine Lake. It’s a two-kilometre tour de force of class V whitewater within a half-hour of downtown Jasper. In 1993, new park regulations prohibited boats on this stretch during May and June to protect harlequin duck nesting. By 1999, a restricted activity order completely shut down paddling between the lakes. Parks Canada cited a drastic increase in rafting traffic as a major disturbance of duck activities. While it is true that the number of rafts floating the river in a year had risen from 10 in 1986 to 1,600 in 1991, the ban included the lower behind-the-mountain run even though it wasn’t commercially rafted.
“We never did see any harlequins on the lower stretch,” commented Al Colwell, junior representative for the nearby Hinton Strokers Kayak Club, adding that the closure pulled their most important intermediate and advanced river right out from underneath them.
While the river is occasionally poached on stealth missions, the Strokers are adhering to the regulation and teaching in less ideal places.
With the closure, paddling in Jasper began its march to the basement, a trip sped up by a 1999 run down the McKale River that ended in tragedy. Jasper’s Mark Oddy was no stranger to high water or steep descents when he entered a sticky hole to knock his paddling partner loose. Though successful at bumping out his friend, Oddy was caught in the mess himself. He tumbled around in the hole until he disappeared. Despite extensive multi-agency searches, his body has never been recovered.
“The death of Mark Oddy had a big effect on the kayaking scene in Jasper,” explains Sean soberly as we wring ourselves out from the evening Maligne Canyon run. “Anybody that was halfway into paddling around here just pulled right back. There was hardly anybody left.” The Jasper River Runners, a club that once filled an entire CN Rail hangar, faced financial troubles and closed its doors soon after.
While many others lost their passion or moved away, Sean and Spencer, spurred on by the paddling pantheon that is Jasper, picked up a video camera and teamed up with locals Logan Rutherford and Mark Basso to film their favourite runs. After a summer of marathon paddling weekends all over B.C. and Alberta, they had enough footage to release the video Entropy. Circulated mainly in Calgary it quickly sold 200 copies and is now in its second printing. A fringe benefit of the video was its showcasing of the filmmakers—virtually unknown until then—as stellar paddlers from a forgotten corner of Alberta.
Entropy also spawned kayakwest.com, a website full of useful information about the runs around Jasper and the West. “Guidebooks only cover a tiny chunk of Western Canada,” says Spencer who runs the site that averages 1,500 hits a month. “Kayakwest encourages people to get out and explore or look at some pictures and river descriptions to see if any given run is something they want to try. There is life in Alberta and B.C. outside of the Kananaskis.”
One of the rivers featured on the website is the Fraser. One hour west of Jasper, carving sharply through the rotten rock below Mt. Robson, the Fraser is still 1,000 kilometres from its deltaic mouth in Vancouver but it’s already big and wide. the Fraser’s raft run put-in is the site of Fraser River Fest, a relaxed and fun event organized by Spencer to showcase his favourite backyard runs: a technical class IV series of boulder gardens with trashy surf waves, a terrifying canyon and a big volume play run. Attendance ballooned from just 12 paddlers in 2003 to more than 50 in 2004.
Energized with the same drive to explore whitewater as the Germans, Sean and Spencer are prodding Jasper’s paddlers toward a rebirth. They have outlasted a boom and bust kayaking scene, where ducks ruled rivers and paddling partners were scarce.
If you show up at Beauty Creek this year when the water is just right there’s a good chance you’ll see Jasper’s local boys standing above Lumbarsis, thinking about that undercut.
Raymont Schmidt is a writer living in Canmore, Alberta.
This article was first published in the Spring 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine. Subscribe to Paddling Magazine’s print and digital editions, or browse the archives.
As long as humans have held whitewater paddles in their hands, they’ve asked the question, “At what angle should I cross an eddy line?” Some have said 45 degrees is the best angle, others argue an approach of 90 degrees is the only way to carve smoothly into an eddy pool. The controversy has spanned several generations of paddlers, yet remains unresolved. Until now.
The solution to this mystery lies in looking closely at the eddy line itself. When you do, you’ll see that the eddy line is not really a line at all. It is actually more like a wedge pointing upstream.
In the photograph, the widening area between line A and B is what we commonly refer to as the eddy line. This eddy line, or wedge, is an area of chaotic water made up of boils and vortices. The upstream end of this wedge, often immediately downstream of a rock, marks the origin of lines A and B. Line A is the current side of the increasingly wide eddy line and line B is the eddy side.
So, how do you decide on an angle to cross the eddy line when it is actually made up of two diverging lines? To answer this, it’s best to work backwards from the eddy pool. At the end of an eddy turn, your canoe should be in the pool pointing upstream. Prior to this, the last point where the canoe was in contact with the eddy line was somewhere along line B. The most efficient entry into the eddy pool is a 90-degree turn off of line B. Any angle larger than 90 degrees results in an unnecessarily wide turn, and any angle less than 90 degrees means front ferrying over the eddy line, which is entirely too much work. The 90-degree crowd is nodding and saying, “I told you so!”
So what about line A? Is it really so important what angle you use to approach this initial eddy line? Anyone who has ever spun out on an eddy line knows it can be very important because of the influence the boils can have on the path of a canoe. As soon as the bow of your canoe touches these boils it will want to turn and face upstream. The risk is that the canoe will face upstream before it makes it to the eddy pool.
The solution is to approach line A with an angle sharp enough to cut a path across the boils so that you can still cross line B at the magic 90 degrees. Since lines A and B diverge, your approach angle will depend on how far you are from the top of the eddy. If you are very close to the top of the eddy (where the lines are close together) you can approach line A at close to 90 degrees. If you are at the bottom of the eddy (where the two lines making up the wedge are further apart) then you should approach the eddy at an angle of 45 degrees. The 45-degree folks are smiling in satisfaction.
So, the whole angle debate boils down to how high or low you hit the eddy. Choosing an approach angle depends on which part of the eddy line you are aiming for. Look carefully at the eddy line and identify both the current side and eddy side of the wedge, break out a protractor and carve a perfect arc into the pool. Mystery solved.
Andrew Westwood is a frequent contributor to Rapid. He’s an open canoe instructor at the Madawaska Kanu Centre and member of Team Esquif.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.
Though we may often take the vastness of our country for granted, I expect that deep down most of us are proud of our great landscape and the role it has played in shaping the history of our country. This pride shows itself as a fierce love for free flowing rivers, nearendless mountain ranges, and the vast boreal wilderness. And while it may be true that we are better positioned than others to gain a meaningful knowledge of the shape of the earth, it is a knowledge that still has to be actively sought. In Canada, a vague and passive appreciation of the land is easy, too easy.
From the seats of our little boats, we have reduced our rivers to a short section between put-in and take- out, a linked series of playspots and ledges. For us, a river becomes a familiar, sometimes memorized sequence of moves that hints at adventure. It is a snapshot, like a photo of a person that in no way indicates health, happiness or history. This limited knowledge weakens us as paddlers and members of a community. Who are we to speak for a river if we only know eight kilometres of it?
Sliding into the water at a put-in I can’t help but wonder what lies upstream, or where the river goes when it flows around a bend and out of sight at the take- out. Do Ottawa River paddlers know anything of the roaring Culbute Rapids, or the many drops at the Swisha? What about the mountainous waves of Clarke’s Folly in spring flood?
To really understand rivers requires commitment, time and even intimacy. To understand a river is to understand something about all rivers, and to understand rivers is to understand geography.
At one time I pursued an encyclopedic knowledge of rivers — wavelengths, gravel bar formation, erosion, particle capacity. This was an exercise in frustration. I came to see that, without connection to whole rivers, these facts are meaningless.
It was not until I explored my own river — not my local whitewater run, but the stream that runs through the culvert down my road — that I began to understand rivers, and therefore geography, in the broadest sense.
My stream is unremarkable in every way except that it is my own. It shapes the landscape I look onto every morning when I wake up and defines the place where I live. If we don’t really know where we live, then it doesn’t matter where we live.
Understanding local streams matters. We need to know our rivers to care for our rivers. News of dams on the Magpie or the Churchill, or a hundred other rivers, means more than the loss of whitewater runs, mere places to play. Dams portend a drastic alteration of geography, and with it an erosion of the knowledge that is our birthright. In backing up the water, dams dry up our sense of place.
Our predecessors travelled without maps and knew their rivers top to bottom. They understood flow through the seasons, the length, breadth and character of a river. Compare this to playboaters who have a bottomless depth of knowledge for a handful of features on a river, yet are oblivious to what lies 100 metres upstream or down.
It’s an oblivion that has to be recognized. Paddlers are the chosen ones. In a world of bulldozed suburbia we view the world with wet hands and water in our eyes. We feel the connection to the Earth through the grip of the current. We must not ignore the geography that created that current and the geography that the current creates.
Paddle past the take-out.
Jeff Jackson is a professor of the outdoor program at Algonquin College in Pembroke, Ont.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.
Everyone knew someone would run it someday. Twisting, steep and ugly, Ragged Falls had festered in the psyche of southern Ontario paddlers. Dropping 85 feet in less than half a kilometre, the falls had repelled any attempt at a complete run, until last November when Billy Harris notched the first full descent.
Just a kilometre off busy Highway 60 as it runs into the southwest corner of Algonquin Provincial Park, Ragged Falls was the most prominent drop in southern Ontario that had yet to feel the caress of plastic.
It is a complex, gnarly, multi-stage drop with plenty to make a sane boater walk away.
“There is lumber, pin spots, rooster tails. When she is crankin’, sphincters are all puckered,” says Harris. “It is a white monster with teeth, scales and attitude.”
Harris had a clean run, only getting into trouble at the bottom when he was drawn toward a lumber yard after starting the celebration too early.
Dale Monkman and Rapid columnist Ben Aylsworth followed shortly after, getting into a few tight spots but escaping unscathed.
In the spring of 2003, Rapid reported on an exploratory attempt by Brent Cooper and Paul Muegge. The pair started at the bottom and progressively ran from higher and higher up the falls before halting their progression still 40 feet below the top.
Gord Baker, a manager at Algonquin Outfitters just down the road from the falls, was watching that day. “If it is in fact runnable top-to-bottom, it would be a dangerous undertaking, one with great risk of injury or death,” said Baker.
While that may well be true, it’s time to take the conditional clause off that quote.
The exploits appear in Ben Aylsworth’s new film H2-HO.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.
If I were a rat, my paddling gear would be neatly folded and stacked in a plastic bin labeled, Scott’s Paddling Gear. The bin would be in the basement among other gear bins—bike apparel, camping equipment, ski wear—all labeled clearly and arranged according to season. I would probably even have a bar of apple-scented soap inside to keep my paddling gear smelling sweet over the winter.
I’ve tried a couple of times to be all Martha Stewart-like in my basement. It’s just no use. I like to stretch my paddling season as close to winter freeze-up as possible. Just when I think it’s time to put my gear away we get a warm December day and it all gets dug out again. Even after the mercury falls, and paddling seems to be out of the question, I can’t bring myself to admit the season is over. The bag of soggy gear just gets tossed in the garage until spring.
This is where I get back to my point about not being a rat.
If I were a rat, I would have learned my lesson by now. I know this because researchers study rodents in laboratories, testing their capacity to recognize and avoid unpleasant smells. In one study, rats quickly learned to associate a poisonous drink with its particular odour and soon knew enough to leave it alone. (Paddlers haven’t figured this out yet, but this is another story altogether.) In another laboratory test, rodents demonstrated a near-perfect memory when it came to avoiding odours.
Scientists, and the rats, tell us there is a direct connection between our sense of smell and memory, and I believe it. The smell of fresh-cut cedar reminds me of the cottage, pipe smoke evokes my grandfather and black felt-tip markers bring back memories of my grade-two art class with old Mrs. Greener. And every spring, when the sun shines, eaves start to drip and creeks overflow their banks, I load my boat and go in search of my gear. Knowing not to look in the basement, I head for the garage, where I fumble around, looking here and there. Then I smell it.
When I unzip my paddling bag to check that everything is inside, my first memory isn’t of walking through an orchard of green apple blossoms.
Like a hurricane through a Stilton cheese factory, the smell of my gear blows up my nasal passage to the odour receptor cells that pass on the sig- nal to the limbic system in my brain that catalogues my memories. A few neu- rons fire and then I smile. “That was a great day,” I say to myself as I remember that last paddle in December.
Rats learn to avoid putrid odours after one or two exposures. They would learn after their first paddling season. They would wash their gear in little rat washing machines and fold it into little rat plastic gear bins labeled, Rodney and Roxanna Rat’s Paddling Gear.
Rats, I guess, are smarter than me. But rats don’t get to paddle late into the fall.
I’m glad I’m not a rat.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions here.
This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2005 issue of Adventure Kayak Magazine. For more great content, subscribe to Adventure Kayak’s print and digital editions here.
This article first appeared in the Early Summer 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine. For more great boat reviews, subscribe to Rapid’s print and digital editions 
The Impex name is said to derive from “import-export,” adopted when Mid-Canada Fiberglass was looking for a U.S. tag for
This article was first published in the Spring 2005 issue of Rapid Magazine. 
