Kindly Old Dr. K’s Hydrosphere

On Sunday July 13 we ran the two events I help organize: the Attainment Race and the Wave Surfing competition.  We had good water conditions for both events this year.

The Attainment Race was held at Difficult Run rapids, in a figure 8 loop as shown in the earlier post.  The average time for all racers was nearly 19 minutes, so there was plenty of lactic acid to go around.  Attaining has been a tradition on the Potomac for over 100  years and it’s as alive as ever.

The Wave Surfing event was held at Wet Bottom Chute, in the heart of the Mather Gorge.  Despite some early skepticism, this turned out to be the perfect venue for an old school hot dogging contest.  The wave was smooth and steady, allowing the full panoply of paddle spinning, paddle tossing, and air banjo tricks.  Ryan Bahn wowed everyone in his C-1, showing all that the entry on the official scoring sheet for standing up in the boat and surfing the wave was NOT a joke.  He opened the door and almost every contestant tried it thereafter.  I don’t have a picture of Ryan, but Jim Hubshman sat Potomac Paddlers says he got some great ones. 

Thanks to Adam Van Grack for convincing me to hold the event at Wet Bottom.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a group of whitewater paddlers having more fun than I did during and after the Wave Surfing event. 

Go to http://www.potomacfest.com/ for more pictures and results.

Attainment racers head upstream for Center Chute and glory.

Wind surfing wasn’t part of the contest, but loads of fun anyway.

Wave Surfers gather for the main event

A glassy wave on a sunny day.

Danny Stock and James Sneeringer

I’m not confident we will get the water levels needed for the Carderock course shown previously, so we’re going to move the race upriver a bit.  We will meet at Anglers Inn lower lot at 0800 for the competitors meeting and the race will start at approximately 0830.

The race will be a Figure 8 course.  We will start at the beach at Anglers put-in and race upstream to Center Chute of Difficult Run Rapids.  Attain Center Chute, then descend through Maryland Chute.  Cross back over to Center Chute and attain Center Chute again.  Descend through VA Chute and return to Anglers and finish by touching the beach at Anglers put-in. 

The course is about 1.5 miles long.  See the map below. 

The Attainment Race will be something different this year, if water levels cooperate.  If the gage stays around its current level we will race from Carderock Picnic Area to Anglers Inn.  This is two miles of intricate, knuckle-bustin’, route-finding hell.  All flatwater you say?  Try it going upstream and I think your perception will change.  See the map below.

If the water level drops too low we will probably head upstream and race from Sandy Landing (the road access on the VA side below Wet Bottom) to S-turn. 

Go to http://www.potomacfest.com/ for the latest information, to register and to volunteer.  If you’re a Potomac Paddler, the Attainment Race is your heritage.  This is the Potomac.  On the Potomac we attain.  ‘Nuff said.

It is …interesting.

I was walking to the put-in at Anglers on the Potomac when I saw Mike Mathwin and friends at the Potomac Paddlesports demo event. Lying there on the ground was the notorious Green boat. Mike suggested I take it for a spin and I was happy to oblige. Here are my impressions.

The idea of a new-school fast boat is very encouraging, as I think this is an area of boat design that’s been neglected for many years. The Green boat looks radically long by today’s standards, but it’s actually only 11 ft. 9 in, so it’s not really that big. The outfitting is very comfortable and nicely done, although I’d have to ditch the thigh braces and make something custom to fit my thunder thighs, as is true of every modern boat I’ve tried except the Jacksons.  It rolls super easy, as do most long boats. The Green is a heavy beast, massing every bit of the advertised 48 plus pounds and maybe a bit more. Not surprising for a long boat designed specifically for extreme racing, there’s a lot of plastic in there.

Coming from paddling short boats most of the time in recent years, paddling the Green is a story of acclimation. For starters it’s relatively tippy, at 24 inches wide. For slalom boaters and old school long boat paddlers this is a familiar feeling, and even long boat newbies will forget about this after a few minutes of paddling. More significant for me was the degree to which the boat is optimized for speed. I was expecting something akin to old school high volume slalom boat performance, but that’s not the Green boat. It’s surprisingly reluctant to turn for a medium length boat and requires a very determined effort to turn. I think the maneuverability on the Green owes more to wildwater boat principles than to slalom boats. Although it has a lot of rocker in the bow, the bow is v-shaped. What this means is that turning the boat requires you to lean hard to the outside of the turn to get the bow tip out of the water and then SWEEP hard to push it around.

Ferries and peel-outs require extra care for the same reason. Ferrying requires a very shallow initial angle and aggressive paddling to stay on line. If you do get off line, however, the raw speed allows you to make up for many mistakes.  The boat sna ps into eddies very nicely, with that old school crispness and dynamic feel missing from so many new boats.

It’s hard to say just how fast the boat is without a direct comparison. I’d say it’s slower than my old 4-meter glass boats like the Lettmann Mark IV, but faster than my T-Slalom. In general the handling characteristics reminded me most of some of the old touring boats like the Franconia or the Phoenix Isere. The Green is slower than these boats but has much better characteristics for steep whitewater, with the upturned bow presumably designed to allow faster resurfacing and such. Creeking and creek racing are not my bag so I wasn’t able to give the boat a fair test of its true purpose. I paddled it hard downriver from the Center Chute and it was a good ride, slicing through the waves nicely and gliding over the swirlies at the rock wall like they weren’t there.  After I gave back the Green boat I hopped in my Super Star and felt like I had taken off ankle weights.

That was my half-hour in the Green boat. You should definitely try it out if you get a chance, and it might be just what you’re looking for. I only wish they made it in a glass 25-lb version.

The Outdoor Industries Association occasionally publishes real numbers on participation and economics of various outdoor sports, including whitewater boating.  I took their numbers on participation in whitewater kayaking state-by-state and reorganized them into something like reasonable whitewater community regions.  I also divided the number of paddlers by the area of the state to get a boater density figure, i.e. how many paddlers per square mile for each state, just for fun.

There are a few surprises in here.  The region with the highest relative participation is New England, with a full 10% of Vermonters being paddlers.  Rhode Island has the highest boater density, with 20 paddlers per square mile!  What’s up with Indiana, with more whitewater boaters than Colorado or Georgia?  California by itself is as big as most other regions of the country.  New York City and its environs also constitute an entire region. 

Some cautions about these numbers:  first, they are old.  These figures are from 2001, and the sport has changed considerably since then.  Other OIA studies indicate that the number of people in the sport has fallen by as much as 80% since that time. 

Not every state was included: the states that don’t appear had numbers of paddlers too small to count reliably.  Also, the OIA based these figures on a metric they call”participants” which they define as a person who has been in a whitewater kayak at least once in the past year.  They also sometimes measure a category called “enthusiasts”, who have been in a kayak at least three times in the past year.  Participants outnumber enthusiasts about ten to one, so if you are using these numbers to describe what we might call “real” whitewater paddlers, i.e. people who own their own gear and go out regularly, you should mentally divide everything by ten.  AW says in their latest promotional video that there are about 100,000 whitewater boaters in the US, and that sounds about right.

So check these out.  How does your state and region rate?

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