Even if I can’t manage to get a day off work to paddle I can still squeeze in a little paddling around work. I took off from the shop at 5:00pm with my buddy Alex to get in a quick run down the gorge on the South Fork American to relax a little before a long weekend of work. We set the shuttle and were on the water just after 6pm - it’s nice to have the water so close. But we could tell that we had missed the bubble of released water from the upstream reservoir so things were pretty shallow at the start. Luckily the gorge is runnable without a whole lot of water - it just makes for a slower run with more paddling. We cruised through the flat stretch at the start and pretty muched cruised through the rapids when we hit the gorge. We finished up just after 8pm - about 2 hours on the water total. The gorge is such a quiet and relaxing place, especially when you’re the last ones on the run and there are no rafts in site.
I didn’t even have time to run home and get my own boat for the run so I borrowed a Pyranha Recoil from our instructional fleet. I was happily surprised at how stable it was considering the squirelly water you get in the gorge. It seemed a more capable river runner than I expected from looking at its lines and volume distribution. We didn’t have the time or opportunity to play much but it did seem a little slow on the wave. And it would take a better playboater than I to really see how it throws ends in a hole.
Post a Comment