Psalm 42:7

I went up to the East Race whitewater course on Saturday with another guy in the club and I can tell my confidence is growing.  The other guy had never been there before, so I showed him around the course.  My main goal was to work on catching eddys and some hole avoidance to get ready to run the Lower Yough at the Ohiopyle Festival.  While the eddy work didn’t go as well as I hoped, I was told that the eddys on the course are harder to catch than those on the Lower Yough.  I could really tell my confidence had grown when I tried to catch the eddy next to v-wave.  This is the biggest feature on the course and the eddy is hard to get into.  Even trying was a big step for me.  As I tried, I hit something wrong (landed on the eddy line?) and got flipped.  So here I am, upside down going through the biggest feature on the course with my paddle scraping along the concrete bottom laid out flat on my back deck.  Instead of freaking out, I ask myself “ok, what now?”  Since my paddle was scraping along the bottom I pushed off to see if I could turn myself over that way.  I got some air, but didn’t get turned over.  So I said to myself “well, I guess I need to set up and roll” and I did it!  The guy paddling with me said he watched for a bit trying to figure out what was going on.  Just a couple of months ago I would have panicked and maybe even forgotten how to wet exit, but I managed to keep my wits about me.  I had done some combat rolls at the bottom of the course in some squirrelly eddy lines, but it was deep down there.  I think it was on my next run I had a chance to try it again.  I passed on trying to catch the eddy, but someone was surfing the wave.  He was on river right so I tried to go past him on river left.  He came over right as I went down, I hit his boat and flipped.  Again I was able to keep my wits and roll!  After I got back up and eddy line just about flipped me again, but I braced.

A few months ago on the Flatrock I wasn’t even in whitewater, I just hit an eddy line wrong, panicked, and swam.  Now I’ve managed to do some good combat rolls in tougher situations.  I’m still a bit unsure about catching eddys, but I’m feeling a bit more confident for the Lower Yough.