Fluid Flow

Sorry I haven’t updated in a while! School began for me yesterday and the homework is already piling up. But before school could start, I had to get in one last great paddling trip. And with Slalom Nationals coming up in about a month, Simon Ranagan (member of the K1 Junior National Team), his father Larry, and myself headed south to the land of sweet tea in the afternoon and Coca-Cola in the morning.
Charlotte, NC is in the far south of Northern Carolina. And there reside two things I enjoy very much: the United States National Whitewater Center, and a piece of property on the shore of Lake Norman where my aunt and cousin live. A massive thanks to my aunt for putting Simon, Larry and I up for 3 nights!
The plan: Simon and I would train at the whitewater center (about 25 minutes from my aunt’s house) from 11am to about 4 or 5pm, while Simon’s father worked. Then we would head back to my aunt’s to rest up for the next day. Along the way we met up with some fantastic old friends: competitive Senior paddlers Catie Vuksitch and Joel McCune, as well as not-so-competitive paddler and “mother hen” Laura Ferguson, a Charlotte local who has been known to put up (with), and feed weary and wet paddlers. We got to watch the new Tarantino film “Inglourious Bastards” with Catie (FANTASTIC movie) and attended the Subaru River Jam, a great event occurring every Thursday night at USNWC.
And now for the main course: the paddling! The USNWC is an amazing piece of construction: 2 gigantic curving concrete channels which share start and end pools and contain class 2-4 drops, fun waves, and one or two munchy holes!
The competition channel is where Simon and I spent most of our time, using what gates we could without getting in the way of rafts. We got in 2 workouts a day except for the last day, when we had 3. I totaled somewhere between 10 and 12 hours on the water spread across 3 days, so I feel prepared for Nationals, an international race to be held in Charlotte on Oct. 2-3. Wish me luck! Well, that’s about all for now. Coming up: potentially a trip to Gauley Festival (Sept 20), a post summarizing the Mid-Atlantic slalom scene, and some wonderings on a new boat!
SYOTR,
Liam

Well, this past weekend was the most paddling I’ve done in a while. We (my mom, sister, and I) left the house at 6:15 Saturday morning, and after stopping for gas, we drove north to Ohiopyle State Park in Southern PA for the annual Ohiopyle “Over-the-Falls” Festival. This is a fantastic gathering of boaters from all around who meet up for one day each year to huck Ohiopyle Falls, a beautiful, riverwide 18 footer on the middle Yough(igheny) River. While my sister and mom headed to nearby Confluence, PA to register for the Riversport Slalom (I’ll get to that in a moment), I got my bib and got ready to go over. Last year was my first year doing the falls, and Ohiopyle remains the largest drop I’ve run.
The really fantastic thing about Ohipyle is that it is a perfect place for rising boaters to step-up their game. Two of those boaters this year were my friends and fellow slalom paddlers Cole Moore and Junior National Team member Simon Ranagan, both from MD. I guided Simon down first, and despite nerves and a long wait, he dropped the falls in style, paddling my red Perception Dancer. Simon was psyched to take a major step towards conquering his fear of heights. His 16th birthday is today, so congrats to Simon!
After our runs, we hiked up the steep, muddy, and PI covered trail to the pathway that meanders along the river. Then, I guided Cole down. He’s 14 and stands about 5′4″, a small guy. He’s recently started paddling my old C1 and is a natural. Our pre-falls conversations went something like this:
Cole: “Liam, I’m sooooo nervous!!”
Me: “Dude, you’re going to be fine. Just paddle hard!”
Cole: “I knoooww…”
Over the PA system: “Oooohhhhh, and this boater’s upside down…and they are out of their boat….”
Cole: “LIAM, DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW NERVOUS I AM?!?!”
Me: “Deep breaths, man.”
He paddled like a champ and nailed the line in a Dynamo.
Also at the Festival was Team Thunderdome, the notorious paddling team from the Great Falls area. The weather called for thunderdoming with a sprinkling of brown-claws, and nobody was dissapointed.
I also got to meet Will Lyons of LVM, and Michelle Gasper, a local boater who Will had just taped taking a decent beatdown at the base of the falls. Hopefully some of the Ohioplye Falls footage will make the next LVM! Michelle had some entertaining stories and hopefully we’ll paddle some more in the future.
After 6 runs (last year I made 5) I was getting bored of just boofing the falls. So on my 7th and last run, I decided to style it up. As I dropped into the entrance slide, I held my paddle high and got a full twirl in, punched a small curler at the lip, reached hard across my bow with my right blade and nailed my first cross-bow boof, with a fluffy landing to follow.
Note: I was also flagged down by a photographer from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who asked if I’d mind running the falls with a headcam on. Sure, why not? If the footage makes it to their website I’ll post a link.
The sequence below was photographed by Andrew Petukov.

But my day was not over! I caught a ride with the Moores to the Riversport campground and met up with the rest of the Bethesda Center for Excellence slalom team. At 5:30 I hit class II Ramcat Rapid for an evening slalom practice with my coach, 2 time silver medalist Dana Chladek, in preparation for the race Sunday. After eating too much good food, and staying up too late around the campfire, we all headed to bed. I climbed into my tent and slept the sleep of the dead.
Until 7:45am, that is. My mom woke me up to a breakfast of crepes prepared by Dana, as well as omelettes prepared with the sausage left over from the prior night and some pancakes prepared by Cole’s father Derrick. The usual race-day banter was thrown around, especially amongst the older paddlers at the race.
I was scheduled to race in the morning session, the fifth boat down the course to be exact. My first run was great: fast and clean. I clocked in at 133.16 seconds on a 21 gate course. My second run fell apart after my bow bounced off the hole move in an unexpected way. Still, I felt good and discovered that my run was the fastest of the morning session. I gate-judged for the second session and discovered that the only C1 to beat my time was Jack Ditty, an accomplished racer and an overall nice guy, despite creaming me by 4 seconds. Simon Ranagan had the fastest time overall in a blazing 117(9?) second run. The course takedown was fast and mostly painless, and was quickly followed up by an awards ceremony (rubber duckies to all medalists with clean runs!) and a raffle (thank you IR, Lucky Dog Cafe, and World Kayak among others). Finally, it was time to leave. The drive home wasn’t too long, and today I helped Dana with a slalom clinic she’s running for new paddlers, following which my sister Eliza and I hit Little Falls at 3.0 feet (apparently the river got up to 3.5 while we were gone, but oh well…).
Well, that just about brings the blog up to date!
Stay safe, SYOTR,
Liam

Just would like to throw up a link to a fantastic trip report/commentary from The Range Life. Todd Gilman takes a look at what paddling culture promotes these days. I’ve always admired The Range Life as a great source for fantastic action shots, but even more so as an intelligently written, very practical kayaking blog. Thanks for the post Todd, I’m glad someone’s keeping perspective!

SYOTR,
LM

Hey all,
Just thought I’d write a quick prescription for some easy entertainment. So, I’ll skip all the Google Earth chatter about “Ever wish you could fly? Now you can! blah blah blah…” and get right into the meat of how useful/enjoyable Google Earth can be.

To find whitewater worldwide:
Whitewater needs elevation. Or rather, change in elevation. So, an easy way to find the gnar via GE is to find the highest mountain in a given country/continent using google search. Usually, these giants are parts of mountain ranges, so you wind up with mountains and valleys galore. Then, start flying up and down the valleys searching for signs of rivers and streams. Use Shift + arrow keys to give you a sense of the ridges and valleys in your chosen area. I suggest enabling the “Places” layer in the left toolbar. This will give you access to pictures and, sometimes, information about the place you are seeing, represented by small blue/silver squares. Click a square to see a first hand point of view of the area you are flying over. To determine gradient once you have discovered a run, use the data shown at the bottom of the screen to determine the elevation of two points on the run, then use the “Ruler” tool to measure the distance between them. Elevation change divided by distance equals gradient.

Example: French Alps. (NOTE: Ignore the USGS water gauge at the top of the sample images. Its due to a fantastic application I downloaded, but is irrelevant in Europe.)
1. Google: tallest mountain in french alps. Result: Mont Blanc
2. Google Earth search: Mont Blanc

3. Zoom in and fly around!

4. Once you’ve found a run, measure the gradient!

This Panoramio picture was attached to a “Places Square” and shows that with a little more water, there’s some fun to be had here!

Well, that’s all there is. It’s a good way to kill some time and do research for your around the world paddle trip at the same time. Plus, who doesn’t like discovering a new descent?
WARNING: Google Earth can be highly addictive! Get off this blog and go paddle…

SYOTR,
LM

Alright folks, let’s try this again. Let’s see if I can average more than one post per year, shall we? In this most recent reincarnation, Fluid Flow will follow my travels, travails, and triumphs in the world of canoe slalom and creeking. So, let’s update: No more are my playboating dreams (I am in the process of selling the boat that followed my s6f: a Dagger G-Force 6.1). I missed making Junior National Team by about 3% at NOC in early April. I now own a 2007 Vajda Lizard XL 355, replacing the red 199..7? 9? Vajda Martikan I previously owned. Earlier this summer I completed 3 weeks of paddling in Canada and New York at Age Group Nationals and Junior Olympic competitions. I made my first run of the Ottawa, during which I cracked the stern of my boat in the first rapid and broke a strap anchor in the second. I also have added to my boat collection an intensely ugly, ridiculously well handling orange Dragorossi Mafia creekboat. I logged 2 runs down the Upper Yough in the weeks directly following my Canada tour while spending 4 great days at C1W racer Hailey Thompson’s farmhouse in WV.

Don’t you see? This is the great thing about paddling: there are so many places to go, people to meet, and rivers and boats to paddle that once you are a boater, you will be entertained for the rest of your life! Now, hopefully, I can share some of that fantastic entertainment with all of you as I strive for higher rankings, taller drops, and most importantly, as much time spent on the river as possible.

SYOTR,
-Liam Malakoff

PS: Here is a link to Hailey Thompson’s far superior, better kept up blog: Hailey Thompson Whitewater: Be more than just a boater