zachary’s kayak life

Vacation Part 1=Gauley Fest.

September 18 to 21 2009.

Day #1. After waking up to an alarm that I had forgotten to silence from the previous morning, oops, we took my mom out for breakfast to celebrate her 41st birthday. then we drove the last 2 and a half hours, and got to the festival site at noon. When we got to Gauley Fest we set up our tents then went for a walk and bought some Gauley Fest T-Shirts (awesome logo by the way). Then it was time to go look at the booths. One of them had this inflatable game where two people had to spar with padded sticks while standing on these small 2 foot high cylinders (the goal of the game is to knock the other person off of their cylinder), it was fun, I got to beat up a lot of people not to mention get beaten up by a lot of people .Then we went to the Jackson Kayak booth to say hi and to pick up our new 2010 boats , mine is a red and white star and I couldn’t wait to try it the next day.

Day #2. We woke up at 6:00, kinda early if you ask me but today it was competition day and the lower Gauley was waiting for us. We met Collin and a couple other W.K. (World Kayak) ambassadors. By the time everyone was ready it was 10.00. I was very excited to get on the water because I was going to get to try my new boat and a new river . Once we were all on the water Colin, our guide for the day, led us down the first couple rapids to the W.K. throwdown’s first stop, a nice friendly hole with good eddy access and a nice pillow, it was a little shallow to one side but no matter it was still good. We all had 3 1min rides and I did pretty good. Then we paddled down to Diagonal Ledges, two amazing waves that were good for spins, blunts and pretty much anything else you wanted to do. I thought that that was were we were going to stop, but no, we ran almost all the rest of the river going through some really fun rapids before getting to our second stop. All I can say about the wave is, it couldn’t promise control but one thing that it could guaranty you, lots of down time. We each had 2 rides, I was really nervous at first, but it didn’t take long to get used to. We all did some kick flips and stuff down the wavetrains that brought us to the takeout, it was fun.

The party that  night was even better then the night before, we had stone oven baked pizza, a funnel cake (a funnel cake is some kind of deep fried dough with powdered sugar, yum, yum), there were games like 4 square and that inflatable beat up game and the Jackson’s were throwing sponges, hats, shirts and toy plastic kayaks off of their R.V.. Every sponge and hat had a number on them so that if you caught one you would have a chance to win a Jackson kayak of your choice, I didn’t win a boat but I did catch a sponge and a toy kayak, hehe .

Day #3. Pack, driving, campsite, fun hike next to the Upper Gauley.

Day #4. The next day at breakfast, Scott (from World Class Academy who were camped a couple sites down) came to our site and invited us to go do the Upper Gauley with them, so we said maybe and that we would think about it. I was really unsure, it is after all a class 3, 4 and 5 and I had never really done anything bigger then a 4 (and even then uncomfortably), but I agreed, so after breakfast we went down to tell them that we would join them. At 10:00am we were at the put-in waiting and at 11:00am we were all next to the water introducing ourselves and at 11:20am we were going down the river enjoying ourselves. The crazy thing about the bigger rapids was that you couldn’t really see were you were going, all you could see would be white, take Pillow Rock for example, a massive white pillow that you plowed into, or Lost Paddle which is an easy 15min class 4,5. Some of the major rapids were Initiation, Pillow Rock, Iron Ring, Lost Paddle and Sweet Falls. My favorites would be Iron Ring, Lost Paddle and Sweet Falls, There were also a couple play spots, but we didn’t stop for long in case the water started to drop. The Upper Gauley was definitely the  high lite of my vacation .

Zachary:).