Uganda!
The White Nile was rather good, and quite large too.
I liked it, the style of paddling that comes from such high volume whitewater really suited me, although it showed that not bothering to fit a hip hugger and higher backrest was a massive mistake; More on that in a moment. First a pretty picture.
Paddler: Joshua Kelly, Photographer: Alistair Gray
So as I was saying, before I went out to uganda, I rebuilt the C1, and thought a bigger backrest would be sensible, but I had no foam and no time, so I reassembled it and hoped for the best. Unfortunately every big wave or hole I struck whilst inverted dislodged my from my saddle and left me sat on the backrest, which made rolling harder, at the point where it’s normally already pretty nasty, this resulted in two swims (exactly 4 weeks apart) from taking a beating in a big crashing wave/hole, and then finding that with each attempted roll staying upright and getting stable got geometrically harder.
But the carnage isn’t over just yet, I had been somewhat excited at the prospect of collecting all of my runs on headcam, what i didn’t count on is that by attaching a peli-case with a recording device on top of my dashboard would actually make rolling the boat nigh impossible (out of 3 possible rolls, I took 29 attempts and rolled once) I didn’t experiment with the headcam unit again which is a shame, as I’m sure that if I’d located the case so that it didn’t touch my straps it would have been fine. But no-one wanted to rescue my sorry arse again. And finally I paddled into the nastiest eddyline I’ve ever seen with no deck or straps, said all manner of profane things about my own intelect and dissappeared for a long time.
I’m waiting to grab more pictures from people I paddled with to spice up this post (at which point I’ll add some more prose too, if that’s more your thing.)
