Croc,
Roger Stevens Creek sounds like my kind of water, only a little backwards;)
It sounds cold enough to make me shiver just thinking about it, and I know well that even when the air is getting warm, the water will stay cold for a while yet. I love whitewater, but those guys that paddle in the winter must love it a whole lot more than I do. I can imagine paddling a canoe on flat water when it is cold, but not doing rough water in a kayak.
The show sounds like a lot of fun; the cutting edge on these sports is pretty far away from us over here. Some of the moves they pull in the closed whitewater canoes are pretty amazing, much more impressive to me than the kayak moves. Probably because I at least understand the kayak moves, even the ones I can't do. I tried crossover paddling with a canoe paddle once (changing sides of the boat without changing grip), and I must have looked pretty ridiculous. Stroke wasn't much either. Some of the new specialized white water boats seem really strange to me; fine if you can have 4 or 5, one for each purpose, but when you have to work as hard to get a boat into the country as we do, you want to do pretty much everything in one boat. A small kayak for clogged creeks might be good, but you sacrifice a lot in terms of cargo capacity; whatever's inside the spray skirt can be difficult to get to. They are very tough, though, and need very little water.
The Inuit-style sea kayaks are beautiful, but they tend to be tippy and easily damaged; I sometimes wonder how the Inuits managed them. Daily repairs, probably. Think I'll stick with fiberglass for the time being. The better fiberglass sea kayaks are wonderful for any kind of flat water paddling.
Hope the snow and ice are fading away, and that you get back to the water. About the other paddlers, who knows, we may find a few one day. I'm supposed to be in a kayak race on Saturday, not really my sort of thing, but the organizers are friends, so I agreed. Won't actually be competing, as everybody else will be using sit-on plastic boats, beside which my boat looks like a ferrari beside volkswagens. Should be reasonably fun, though, as long as it's not too hot. Peak of hot season here now, but it does look like the rain will come early. I'm hoping.
Hiked up a stream last weekend in the jungle south of here, drains the caldera of a dormant volcano. Found a beautiful picnic spot, nice deep pool for swimming in the middle of the jungle, lots of parrots and other birds around. Locals say there is a big waterfall another 3 hrs walk upstream; next time I'll get an early jump, and try to find it. |
