Day 3
The kids showed up the third day with sleepy eyes and big smiles. These kids had been working hard the first two days, with two more days to go . . . and they were stoked. We spent the morning building our own river out of a throw rope, big rocks and sticks. Next, we had the kids take a foamy piece down the “river”, pointing out eddies, going in and out of eddies with perfect form, ferrying, etc.
The next part of the day was spent on the Lower White Salmon - a class II section of river. We had a bit of a hike into the river, but everyone helped out and we made it!
At the put-in, there was a perfect eddy line to warm-up and practice eddy turns, s-turns and ferries. This eddy was a little stronger than the day prior, but the kids made it look easy.
We continued downstream through the largest rapid - cave wave. One of the instructors took the first group down, while I “rafted up” with Camille so we could go through the rapid together. The waves hit her as she giggled the entire way down. We all walked back upstream and did the rapid again.
Continuing downstream with a lot of flat water, we played bumper boats and told stories. Once at the take out - which is a lake - we stopped and played a few more games before we had lunch. We played piano keys and a fun game called “Chariots of fire” (which both Christina and I thought was a challenging game, but fun factor was high).
The second half of the day, we took the kids rafting on the class III-IV section of the White Salmon and continued to talk about river features and pointing out eddies, waves and holes. (The first photo is of Hope before she plunges off the 20 foot cliff jump on the rafting trip . . . way to go Hope!)
Questions of the day:
“What was your most favorite part of Day 3?”
“My favorite thing we did was going rafting and going over Husum Falls.” (a 10-foot waterfall)
“My favorite part about today was going over Husum in a raft.”
“My favorite thing about today was going through “Cave Wave” and when I hit Manon’s boat and tipped over at the end of the rapid!”
“My favorite thing was rafting and going through a long class III rapid - corkscrew.”
“What has been your most fun experience so far in this course?”
“The most fun I have had so far was when we were playing “piano keys” and Manon got to my boat, and when she stepped on it, my entire boat went completely vertical and we fell out. It was so funny!”
“The most fun I have had was when we tipped the raft over in an eddy and used it as a giant waterslide.”
“The most fun I have had was playing games, flipping and going through Cave Wave.”
“The most fun I have had was when Hope hit my boat and flipped over at Cave Wave.”
At the tail end of Day 3, the kid’s were wiped out. One more day to go . . .Day 4 on the way.
Heather Herbeck
This entry was written by hherbeck and posted on August 23, 2007 at 10:06 am and filed under Regions. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.
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