Our TVF Team, the Sexy Kayaking Beasts (SKB), has been training hard over the past two months preparing for this years competition. Most of our training has been occurring during the weekends on the Little, Wilson Creek, Big Creek, Noli, and Tremont. The past two weekends some of our team members have really been stepping it up!
The weekend before last (2-2-08) some of our team (Brian, Steve, Matt and I) and support crew (Josh and Natalie) embarked on our Personal First Descent (PFD) of Tremont. The run was a blast, even considering that we caught it at an Extremely Low Flow (ELF). Natalie had to pull out early in the run because of her shoulder problems, but she was OK. The run is super continuous with a few good size drops (5-6 feet)! The run really lives up to it’s name, “TRE”-mont. The run was littered with wood and strainers. We had four different strainer incidents and had to portage around two impassable strainers. We had to extract a boat from one of the strainer incidents, but everyone overall had a good 1st run.
The gradient for Tremont is awesome: 200′ in mile 1, 185′ in mile 2, and 141′ in the final mile = total of 526′ per lap (Leland’s book rates it as a class III-IV). We only got in one lap, because the flow dropped out by the time we reach the take-out. The put-in is at the end of the road past the Tremont Institute in the Smokies. The take-out is the parking area of the Tremont Institute.
After we finished our epic lap on Tremont we headed down to the Little for a couple of laps, which went much smoother! The flow was great (around 3.4 feet on the gauge)! We were completing the laps at the rate of about 35 minutes per the 3 mile run. We ended up with a TVF of 1,156′ for the day.
Last Saturday (2-9-08) while I was gone to Rock Island hucking the Spout of Great Falls and picking up the new J.A.W. Fleet, some of my teammates went back to the Little for some more practice. They completed 6 laps for a total of 1,890 TVF for the day… a good day of practice!
Well it looks like TVF may be officially starting later this week, so our team is getting pumped! To keep up with our team correspondence and stats. visit and request to join our Facebook group with this link below:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=8706782635
Our Official Team Stats. will be posted on Boatertalk at this link below:
Wish us luck, cheer us on, and pray for our safety during this fun competition! Have a nice day!
One Comment
We should move our TVF page to worldkayak!
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