Kindly Old Dr. K’s Hydrosphere

I recently helped out some colleagues doing inspections of some dam structures.  My young engineers didn’t have a boat to get out to the riser, so they came to Kindly Old Dr. K for some help.  The Superstar may not be known as a workboat, but that’s what I had on my car, so it was pressed into service.  It turns out that playboats make fine platforms for dam inspections.  Standing up in the cockpit to get onto the ladder is dicier than a johnboat, but, hey, I had a budget and a schedule to meet.  Of course, practicing my double pump hardly slowed me down at all.  Sometimes I can’t believe I get paid for this stuff.

Photos are by Troy Biggs, PE.

Adam Van Grack got his new Backlund last week.  The photos speak for themselves.

On July 11-13, 2008, the Mighty Po will come alive with fun and competition.  Freestyle, attainment, boater-cross, the Great Falls Race, and a big party on Saturday at Anglers Inn restaurant are all included.  For more info go to http://www.potomacfest.com/

 Here’s a glimpse of the venue.

I ran across another old article I had forgotten about years ago.  This trip report is from the January 1974 issue of the Cruiser, the newsletter of the Canoe Cruisers Association of DC.

I ran across a few more old photos and I thought I’d stick them up here just for fun. 

Here’s me 34 years ago, modeling career already headed south.  This is around 1974, when I worked for Appalachian Outfitters, an outdoor store and boat shop with several branches in the DC/Baltimore area.  This was for a brochure on our paddling gear. 

This is the Anglers Inn put-in for the Potomac in the winter of 1977.  The river had gone up and down many times while the air temps stayed very cold.  As a result, the edges of the river were covered with huge blocks of ice for miles up and down the Gorge.  Getting in was easy, getting out…not so much.

Here is my old pal Al Jenkins on the Potomac in the winter of 1972, on Olmstead Island near Great Falls.  Note the high-tech gear.  I should point out that some of Al’s gear was outmoded even for the time.  His Lettmann Mark IV boat was state-of-the-art, though, and it’s still a good boat.

Here’s another old paddling companion, Cal Smith, on the Middle Fork of the Tygart, West Virginia in about 1973.  I’m not sure who that is running the drop.  They don’t make boats like that anymore.

It was 50 degrees today, with 4.75 ft on the Little Falls gauge, about 20,000 cfs.  There are some good spots on the river for the right boat at this level.  For playboaters one of the good ones is Offutt Island Channel, a small channel on the Maryland side of the river with a nice little breaking wave to play around on.  It's not anything radical, but it's friendly and safe, adventure enough when the water still has ice in it.  Some local yokels and some folks from Team River Runner were out this afternoon.  For 24/7/365 boating you can’t beat the Mighty Po. 

We got a bubble of water on the Potomac last weekend and it changes the whole character of the river.  You never paddle the same river twice.  Here’s a little video comparing the flows over just two days. 

Fellow Traveler Update 12/28/07 - She’s still there two weeks later, despite higher water.

For the last month or so, this heron has maintained a constant vigil over the small fish in the Maryland Chute on the Potomac. I’ve paddled through the chutes a dozen times recently, from 8:00AM to dark, and she is always in the same spot. She’s having great success, as I’ve seen her snarf up quite a few small fish, and she doesn’t mind if you play in the hole just a few feet away. She doesn’t like it if you eddy out on river left near her, though. What a joy to see our fellow travelers on the planet enjoying their day on the river.

I recently had the opportunity to attend a great conference on stream restoration and ecology the Mid-Atlantic Stream Restoration Conference at Rocky Gap State Park in western Maryland.  The conference featured some of the real rock stars of the river science world, including Dave Rosgen and M. Gordon “Reds” Wolman.  Being at a conference with these guys is the scientific equivalent of being at a paddling event with, say, EJ and Bill Endicott.

Although this isn’t directly paddling related, the work being done by these folks should be of great interest to boaters.  It’s unlikely that your favorite stream has gone untouched by the  principles and techniques we were at this conference to discuss.

For more information on this topic just google “stream restoration” and  you’ll be inundated with information.

Rocky Gap State Park, a beautiful venue

Vendors exhibits included some cool schwag, like a writing pen made entirely of corn!.

A couple hundred scientists and engineers chowing down.

One of several dozen technical presentations.

The man himself, Professor Wolman, one of the fathers of river research.

Backlund paddles have acquired an almost mythical status among paddlers world-wide.  Here are a few pix of the bent-shaft beaut I’ve been using about a year and a half. 

If you haven’t used a fine wood paddle, you owe it to yourself.  A Backlund or a Jimistyk is as different from a production paddle as Laphroaig is from bar scotch.  Every paddler who knows they’re in it for the long haul should have one. 

 Contact Keith at backlundpaddles@juno.com or Jimi at mrmodes@jimisnyder.com

Here is some footie from the Freestyle Nationals at ASCI last weekend.  It’s only roughly edited, no music track other than the event PA system, but it will give you a taste for what it was like.   This is far from comprehensive, but I tried to get at least a little bit of everyone. 

Picasa Web Video

This is the first time I’ve seen a top level freestyle comp, and it was loads of fun.  It inspired me to go up to Horseshoe on the Potomac the next day and throw down some.   

Results are in the last part of the video, and are available from ASCI. 

This is Colin Kemp, World Kayak guru, formerly of Washington, DC, currently of Reno, NV, on Observation Deck Rapids near DC.  The guy with the tripod is Roy Sewall, a pro photographer who asked us to “pose” for photos for his photo art book about the Potomac.  This was fall of 06, I believe.  I’m not sure if the other photographers were working with him or tourists.  I just like the way this photo turned out. 

 One of the cool things about O-Deck is that it’s right below Great Falls.  Colin is looking upstream at an 80-foot high cascade right in front of him.  Intimidating and very impressive.

The white stuff on the rocks is a type of diatom that turns white when it dries out during certain seasons.  When it’s wet it’s green/brown and slick as ice.

I blitzed up to the ASCI whitewater course today, and had fun.  I got in some playing, got stuffed briefly under a raft, got spun silly in the surging whirlpools.  The main thing I went for was to try out the portage escalator, which wasn’t operating the last time I was there (also ‘cuz I ended up with a free season pass, but that’s another story.)  The conveyor was the kind of thing we used to fantasize about in the old days when we dreamed of whitewater becoming as big as skiing, but I never expected to really see one.  It’s bizarrely cool.

  As a bonus I ran into an old compadre whom I hadn’t seen in probably 20 years, Steve Draper.  Drapes is one of our finest slalom racers, coaches, and race organizers.  It’s always a great pleasure to see the old gang still representin’. 

 Drapes and I at ASCI

Going up the ramp

Queueing for the ramp

 Not long ago I got a CD that contains several decades of the Cruiser, the newsletter of the Canoe Cruisers Association in DC.  In perusing the old issues I came across this item, which I had forgotten about.   This is from August 1974.

What Jim didn’t say in the article was that we owed the new move to a boat innovation.  The boats we used were an early batch of Hollowform River Chasers, taken from stock at Appalachian Outfitters, where Jim was store manager and I was a clerk.  This batch had been disastrously under-cooked and were as flexible as saran wrap.  They were un-sellable death traps for river running but we decided to take a couple out to see if we could get some fun out of them.

What we discovered was that if you plugged hard into a wave or hole the entire bow would collapse down onto your legs like a pair of too-tight pants, the air blowing out the top of your skirt explosively.  The skirt would then re-seal around the waist making the flat bow semi-permanent.  With no volume in front and loads of it in the stern the boat was stable in a vertical position.  We found we could spin down the eddy line for long distances, standing on the foot braces and pulling cross-bow after cross-bow. 

Thirty-one years later I applied this experience when I started learning to playboat.  There are a lot of similarities in handling characteristics between our old flexy River Chasers and my modern playboat.  The world does seem to move cyclically.

Internet disclaimer.  Since there’s no such thing as putting too fine a point on anything on the net, let me say it plainly: I don’t really think we invented playboating that day. 

Here are a few pics from the last month or so. 

Starting line of the Potomac Festival Attainment Race.

Me at the Maryland Chute-Out (Photo courtesy of Monique Hubshman and Potomac Paddlers)

 Team Jackson at the Maryland Chute

My wife and son on the local reservoir

My daughter on the reservoir

Sandy and Charlie Walbridge on the Yough