“It’s just a grade 3 bimble…”
Yesterday evening at the crack of 7pm I got dragged off to run the seiont, mainly because it was a chance to meet some living legends (Chris Sladden, Franco Fererro, and a lesser known bloke called Pete Woods who’s a definite contender for the title of the best paddler in wales).
Anyway, I asked what the river was like, because I didn’t want to have to reassemble my gus (I’m fitting lateral reinforcement made of strips of old Jefe) so I might take the prelude… I got the eponymous reply “It’s just a grade 3 bimble…” what I hadn’t been told was that it was infested with evil weirs, started with a sketchy grade four rapid round a blind bend and into a tree, and was continuous at the grade for 12 miles, oh and to round off reasons I shouldn’t have been in an open boat it was beginning to flood.
So all the preconditions were set for a bit of an epic…
We started in a big cluster of about 9 of us, rounded a blind bend to see an evil ledge hole with a tree in it, or a massive pourover, at this point my buddy Mike was around a foot away from me he boofed off one side of the pourover as i did the other… and i landed square on his back deck and lost grip on my t-grip as the paddle hit him square in the head.
At this point a very dazed mike pushed me away, causing me to fall over, i fumbled for my t-grip, and rolled up, only to slam directly into a massive downed tree, get sucked under it and swim… after a couple of seconds I resurface and grabbed my kit, by the time they realise I’m not drowning in the tree but swimming, I’ve already made it to the edge and am struggling to get a swamped boat out with no eddies available.
After a brief empty I set off again, catch up and we both appologise for our poor spacing skills. we then reach a stretch of about ten weirs in a row, each progressively bigger than the last, with no eddies in between, at this point I began to realise that an open boat with no bailer and no pump battery wasn’t the wisest choice in the world…
after that there’s a stretch of fast flowing flat past a local fishing club’s clubhouse, the anglers have a long running emnity to the canoists, and so decided to stone us as we paddled past, as one presumably does…
Following that we continued for another 9 miles without another eddy, including two unportagable weirs with massive towback… and got out in Carnarfon harbour, via a ladder, before hauling the boats up a 15 foot seawall, necessitated as the normal getout was nowhere to be seen.
The odd thing is, OpenBoating that river was a poor choice, but I feel I gained from it, I certainly learned a lot about how to deal with a swamped boat, and whilst i can barely stand to support myself today (back and ab muscles are on fire…) I’ve certainly improved my power development, if only because I had too. Morover it boosted my confidence massively (especially after my little incident last week) because despite being in several desperate situations and generally having a pretty tough time, I kept my wits and managed to have a great deal of fun…
I’m sure someone will come and tell me I’m wrong, but having nearly come a cropper to a great many overgrown and fallen trees I’d add “don’t paddle an open boat that can’t bail in the flow” to Nealy’s list of proscribed behaviours when flood paddling.
