I’m still new to the sport and consider myself a class III paddler. My Class IV runs have usually been at lower flows so they weren’t pushy or if I ran them at normal flows I’d run part of it and swim the remainder. *sigh* I’ve got a good roll and it comes through in Class II and III stuff very reliably but Class IV is proving challenging for me still. Hell, my first roll was at Bull’s Sluice on a 1.4′ run. Granted I had a total of five swims that same trip but it was Jan 29, 2007 and I’ve come a long ways since then.
I’m soon to be heading over the Pacific and living in Eastern China. I believe there is potential for some good whitewater there. I wish I could say it is the whitewater that is taking me there but in truth it is for my wife’s love that I go. We are moving to her home town of Wenzhou. It is just South of Shanghai and on China’s Eastern coast. Home to more than 7.8 million people I may uniquely be, “One in a million.” It’ll be some serious changes to this Georgia born and raised country boy but I’ll manage. I’ll work with her parent’s factory which makes eye glasses and sunglasses. I’ll be handling sales our international customers, attending trade shows back home in the States, a couple in Europe and Asia as well. I may also teach English classes on the side. Should you ever meet a Chinese person and they say, “Hey ya’ll”, that would be my fault. *blush*
The large river that goes through the center of Wenzhou is called the Ou Jiang (the word for a river of this size is, Jiang) and it has a number of promising tributaries. Unfortunately after spending one evening on Google Earth hunting for potential whitewater sports I discovered about 30 dams in the local area. Everything from small pour over dams to large ones holding back good size lakes. Still, I did see some signs of whitewater but due to the low quality of the satellite images I couldn’t tell too much from the blur (about the same quality as the famous Chattooga rapid, Bull’s Sluice). During my trip in October 2006 I asked my brother-in-law to take me to see one of the potential rivers that I had seen on Google Earth. As we drove into the country side I was thrilled, almost as giddy, in my anticipation of discovering some great whitewater. Sadly when we reached the river and I looked down the steep banks to the river below it was nearly dried up and you would never have convinced me before hand that there could be such huge, white rocks down there! White rocks? *sigh* Those blurry white spots had fooled me. Our search continued and eventually I saw some promising signs of fun. We reached one spot on the Nanxi Jiang which had backed up (naturally from fallen rock, not damming, as far as I could tell) that had a vendor renting tubes for people to float in. Before and after this stretch were some great looking drops, just not enough water flowing over them. I’ll look forward to next year’s rainy season and see what happens then.
Also, being a coastal city they are prone to typhoons (what they call hurricanes in the Western Pacific). Wenzhou was hit with no fewer than three typhoons last year, one of which was the strongest since the 1950’s. When I was there in July/August of 2004 we had a strong typhoon hit the city and surrounding country-side. The damage in the city was superficial but in the country-side 119 people were killed by flooding. Mud slides and roads being washed out are common. Due to that, I’ll have a a strong sense of caution when I’m checking these remote locations during a storm.
I’m pushing myself these days as time is ticking away before my trip. I hope I can confidently call myself a solid Class IV boater by spending a great deal of my weekends on the Ocoee. Once I’m in China I do not know if I’ll have anyone to lean on for guidance and likely I’ll be teaching friends and family there the basics of whitewater kayaking. Who knows, some day perhaps I’ll be able to invite some of you over and show you some awesome runs! The Chinese beer isn’t as good as the micro breweries we have around here but you can still get Budweiser just about every where.
SYOTR!