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.

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?

Photos are by Troy Biggs, PE.

 Here’s a glimpse of the venue.

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.