Details

Written by Jim Poulin

Category: Trip Reports

Published: 11 September 2009

Hits: 35

Organizer(s): JimP

Date: 2009-09-04

End Date: 2009-09-07

Kayakers (K1): RodW, DanB, JohnG and JimP

Canoers (OC1): BrockR

Predominantly: Int-adv WW

Water Level: Medium low

Painted Gauge Height (ft) e.g. '3.3': 1.00

Executive Summary

A typical Ottawa 3 day weekend. We arrive with huge expectations and excitement. We spend three marvelous days in warm, fluffy, big water under sunny Canadian skies. At the end we head home tired, sore, hung over and sunburned but with big smiles on our faces.

And now on to the details...

What is provided below is a mere highlight version of actual events. Please ask any of the participants for further details or any of the myriad of stories that I deemed "unfit to print".

Friday, September 4

The various participants arrive at River Run to set up camp. All arrive too late to head up to McCoys for a park and play. Jim and John, as usual, are the last to arrive. Sometime around 12:30am.

Saturday, September 5

River level is 1.25 on the Owl Gauge.

At first we are surprised by the number of paddlers in the campground. While it is a three day weekend for both the Canadians and the Yanks it does seem more crowded than usual. Read on to see why.

After a semi-leisurely breakfast our intrepid group of paddlers head on to up to the put in. We paddle the "warm up" section - in other words flat water to McCoys. Since this is Brock's first look at Phil's hole and because most of us have not paddled in a while we scout. It is always fun to see an Ottawa rookie when they first lay eyes on Phil's hole. Brock's OMG moment was just one of those looks you wish you could capture on film.

Baby Face was barely in at this level but we still managed to hang out for a couple of hours to surf and sun.

We then proceeded to run the Middle Channel as a warm up for the big water that was yet to come. Everyone did great and there may have been a fish counting incident or two. The Middle was quite busy given the level but that followed the observation that there were a number of paddlers around this weekend.

So why were there so many paddlers around you ask? Well let me tell you...

This weekend happened to be the first annual Ontario Paddling Club competition. There were four or five paddling clubs each with fifteen or twenty participants. Some were from close by Ottawa and others traveled from the Toronto area.

The competition was held on Saturday and consisted of seven events. Each paddling club scored points determined by the order of finish in each event. The winner was crowned King of the Ontario Paddling Clubs.

Here is a summary of the events:

McCoys Relay - Five paddlers on a team take turn running McCoys with the "baton" - actually a rubber chicken. When finished the paddler ran back to the top of the rapid with the baton and the second paddler negotiated the rapid. This goes on until all five have run. Shortest time wins.

Cardboard Boat Race - Each club builds a cardboard boat out of cardboard (obviously) and duct tape. The boat is paddled from the top of Upper Lauren rapid through Lower Lauren. This sounded more like controlled swimming with wet cardboard. Fastest time is the winner.

Advanced Boater Cross (aka where paddling meets X-Games) - Thirty paddlers take off in a mass start at the top of the Normans rapid. The race continues through Coliseum. Fastest time wins. This one produced much carnage and would have been fun to see!

Intermediate Boater Cross - same idea as above but running a more civilized course through Dog Leg and Blacks rapids.

Once the water events have been completed the team head back to camp for the land events. Before any land event takes place there is a mandatory warm up period. Something we call happy hour in the States. Makes the land events much more interesting!

Kayak Toss - pretty much exactly as it sounds. Huck a Riot kayak as far as you can. Amazingly some people can actually chuck these things forty or fifty feet!

Z-Drag - a team sets up a Z-Drag and pulls a pick up truck up a slight incline.

Shuttle Vehicle (aka how to trash a perfectly good car) - load as many boats and people in a car and drive it twenty feet. No worries about the dents and broken suspensions. Check out the pictures in Paddling Pix. The winner had an amazing 21 boats and people in the rig!

After all this entertainment you would think we didn't need any more. But you would be wrong! Another first for this group, River Run was hosting Yuk Yuks down at the pavilion. A full on comedy show with six different comedians. Very funny and led to many repeated lines for the rest of the weekend (he's a loser, TJ shut the F up).

Sunday, September 6

A major push by the team saw us at McCoys rapid at 8am! Not unexpectedly, we were not the first ones there. Even with a few other boaters we could not keep Babyface busy 100% of the time. We spent three hours there until the lines and the raft traffic began in earnest.

Three hours on Babyface can tucker a boater out so we went back to camp to recharge with Sunday brunch! Pancakes and sandwiches all around.

Around 2pm we came to a decision point. It was either time to run the Main or starting drinking. We felt the Main run to be a safer choice and off we went.

The river level was 1.0. This is the lowest the Ottawa has been all year! Even at this level there is plenty of excitement to be had.

It was a bit entertaining to see some of the locals waterskiing on the flat water about McCoys.

Brock worked on his triathlon skills - walk, paddle & swim. The latter two events sometimes being chosen by the river gods.

All the rapids were big and at this level the usually play spots (garb, pushbutton) were not quite right. We were in a pack of quite a few boaters and they provided a great show at Coliseum. We ran through Coliseum with varying degrees of success (no swims though).

We paddled the remaining river with dreams of dinner and beer in our heads.

It was late when we got back to camp and rustled up dinner just before it got dark. Then it was beers, guitars, drums, pig poems, groover stories, campfires and Canadian paddlers until midnight. How did we stay up so late?!?

We did make one easy decision that evening. A group of paddlers were headed out at 10pm for a moonlit run down the Main. We cracked another beer and wished them well!

Monday, September 7

Well, we had planned to be up at 7:30 and on the river early. So much for that plan...

Everyone was sore and tired. But a little Vitamin I and we were rarin' to go!

We headed down to Babyface for a few more surfs. We would like to say that the lines were so huge that we didn't stay long. I think it was more the multiple missed attempts to get on that thing that caused us to look downstream sooner than one would expect.

Today's poison was the Middle Channel. River level was holding at 1.0 and no one had the desire to test the Main channel again.

Everyone had a great run and the water was warm and fluffy as usual and the sun beat down on us and all that whitewater. We were treated to a raft decent of the middle tongue of Garvins. They made it look easy but there was a roped off raft guide at the bottom ready for a live bait rescue...

Got back to camp around 1:30 and packed it in. Everyone was on the road by 2:30.

Getting through the border for us was an easy Class I (5 minutes). The line up going north back into Canada was approaching Class V (more than a mile of stopped traffic).

I will leave you with the line of the weekend that was repeated more than once:

"I am going to F#@%&in' murder you in your sleep!"

With that the annual Ottawa trip is in the books. I look forward to you being part of next year's adventure!

jimp

Details

Written by Ryan McCall

Category: Trip Reports

Published: 01 June 2009

Hits: 1328

Organizer(s): Dave P

Date: 2009-05-31

Kayakers (K1): Dave P, Russ K, Marshall P, Ryan M

Predominantly: Advanced WW

Water Level: Medium low

Primary Realtime USGS Gauge Site: New Haven USGS

Primary Realtime USGS Gauge Flow (cfs), e.g. '797': 300

I bet that title caught your attention...

The prior three days yielded some good flows on the usual suspects. It was Sunday and a handful of us were still itching to get in the water even though most other rivers had dropped off. Dave stated it best, wanting an Adventure. An adventure is what we got.

With Russ being the seasoned vet in the Middlebury Gorge we had a guide that not only knew the river but if you have ever paddled with Russ as your guide, you know all too well that his mind is like a vault and no detail is too small. We even got hi tech drawings in the dirt of what rapids looked like. AWESOME! Marshall had been down it at a lower flow a long time ago when the Birth Canal drops were slightly different and Dave had only boated below the Birth Canal. I was the newbie on the run (no pun intended).

So after a mandatory look see at the Birth Canal from above Rebirth we were back up to the road and put in up towards Ripton. The first mile or so down to the confluence with the North Branch of the Middlebury River was really fun class III/III+ continuous boogie. Speaking for myself, it was nice to get some of that in before the action started. My heart was so far in my throat before the run, I was actually feeling sick. Lots of anticipation and anxiety for me from hearing about and seeing some pretty stout drops from a distance and the committing and unportageable nature of parts of the gorge. So like I said the upper part of the run was a nice way to loosen up and get focused or decide that you were just not feeling it which on this river you have to be feeling it before dropping in or you are SOL.

The 4 of us arrive at the confluence with the North Branch and the anticipation starts back up as Russ starts to give exacting details of what to expect. Marshall and I jump out of our boats, one with a camera the other with a rope and watch both Russ and Dave run the entry drop of the Fallopian Tube and both get splatted on a rock that Russ said has pinned him in the past and looked like he and Dave missed the same fate by a very small margin. At this point it was get'er done or hike it out. Marshall had only 3 days in his boat this season prior to this one so he made a judgment call and hiked it out. I had been having a solid season up to now and felt pretty confident that I would be OK pushing into the Birth Canal. I ran the entry drop a little further right than Dave and Russ and never got near the said pin rock. However, I was completely locked into a brace when I needed to dig into an eddy so this was the first missed move of the day for me. That missed move meant I was going to get the first shot at the 15 ft waterfall at the end of the Fallopian Tube. So now more details from Russ were blinking bright red in my cortex about a wicked crack in the wall directly above the falls that can swallow the front end of a boat and stick you in there. So even though the current was pushing you in the direction of the crack, you needed to drive across the current and try to get a late boof off the falls. As everything felt like it slowed down to a weird movie slo-mo shot I came up on the crack...I could see the edge of the falls and where the nose of my boat could be swallowed so I dug and stroked and then felt like I was hanging in space for a whole lot longer than any other 15 footer I have ever run. It all went white and then dark and then white again and then.......I was bobbing in the inner gorge, the birth canal.

It felt like eternity before Russ banked around the top and threw a HU-JASS boof and landed about as perfectly as I have ever seen off of a trashy lip! Lots of whoops and hollers and smiles and we sat bobbing in our respective eddys for Dave. Dave threw a pretty cool melt-down/boof thingy that sent him out but not far enough from the spout of the falls to keep him from an AWESOME ender. This resulted in a swim in the preferable river right eddy where Russ was able to scramble up the ledge and get Dave a rope to climb up the wall on and then tow his boat out of the surging eddy. Absorbing some sunlight and taking in the whole beauty of the gorge for a few minutes was pretty cool!

All regrouped we paddled down to look at the next drop where you boof a 3 foot ledge and then get left to set up for the drop called Cunnilingus. It was a squirrely flume that had changed from the last time Russ had been on it (a 6 foot boof before). Russ styled it and was in the eddy above the next drop. Dave ran up to his boat and came down through the ledge and Cunni with style as well. Next up was me...As finished the 3 foot boof I was in the slack water above Cunnilingus and could see Dave out of his boat and headed down the river left shore. I though wow he boogied on down through Rebirth and was already scouting the stuff below. Later I found that Rebirth munched on him as it was about to destroy me. So I hit Cunni in the right location but didn't anticipate it to snag my bow and flip me so quickly. Next thing I know I am getting hammered along the bottom of the river and taking shots to the head and hands..then it all stops and I am broached against a boulder upside down above Rebirth - one of the ugliest rapids I have ever seen or boated and the end result of a mess up is equally miserable. So I say forget this and wet exit my boat and Russ is in the eddy telling me to stand up and grab my boat. Huh - easy enough I am safe and didn't run rebirth upside down...I think to myself. I do a quick sort of mental regroup and go to pick up my boat to drain it out and the right shoulder is feeling a wee bit loose. Russ is pretty anxious to get down river to see if Dave is OK so I tell him to hit it and watch his line as I all the sudden realize I am in the Birth Canal alone and have no choice but to run the next drop with a loose shoulder because I couldn't have been is a more committing place w/o a way out but down the river.

OK all systems check ferry into the eddy throw a few paddle strokes and peel out and drop off the same line Russ did. I don't even know what happened next other than I was up side down again and hanging on for a good opportunity to roll. Then it hit me - O S!#t roll NOW! The entire current of the river pushes into an undercut portion of the wall on river right called the Catcher's Mitt. I hit my roll to hear Russ screaming PADDLE! I paddle just enough to get away from the mitt but my stern is sucked under and I flip again and end up in a shallow but rapid spot that yanks at my paddle and I feel the shoulder go again. I let go of the paddle and manage a hand roll (what the hell is the purpose of having a hand roll - you can't paddle anywhere after you are up anyways). Now I am headed down a class V river w/o a paddle backwards. It doesn't take long for me to get flipped and being completely shot I swim up on a beach river left just above the next rapid. My boat is stuck in an eddy up river a bit and Dave is laughing because he did the same thing.

At this point I see that I can hike out and I am fairly confident that there is no way I am boating out of the gorge with the way my shoulder is behaving. Russ and Dave decided that they are going to put my spray skirt on my boat and bump it down the river through several other legit class IV and V rapids. I am happy that I don't have to try to carry it up the gorge wall and bid farewell to my trusty cork and paddling partners as I can hear the familiar BONK sound of a boat bouncing off of rocks.

While out of the gorge I hooked up with Marshall and we got the vehicles all down to the take out and chilled while we waited.

It took the guys probably an additional 90 minutes to boat the remainder of the river to the take out where I saw them send my boat down through the last rapid running it cleaner than I probably would have in it. The rest of their run was uneventful and enjoyable with out the stress of the Birth Canal but still had them on their toes.

Upon their arrival at the take out vehicles brewskis were popped all around. At the very least I needed to have beer on hand for the two guys that got my boat safely out of the gorge w/o me having to haul it up the wall.

Dave got his adventure...at least what I saw of his run. You'll have to ask him about the rest of it...

Details

Written by Scott Gilbert

Category: Trip Reports

Published: 30 June 2009

Hits: 33

Organizer(s): Scott Gilbert

Date: 2009-06-29

Kayakers (K1): Scott Gilbert & Chris Ingram

Predominantly: Advanced WW

Water Level: Very high

Gihon was high at 4 seams surging to 3.75 seams showing which I now know is my cutoff level.

We paddled to the dam on the upper section, it was one solid sheet of water and a nasty walled in hole at the bottom with towback maybe 6ft downstream so we paddled back to the car and headed down to the lower section.

We put in at Bedhead and ended up walking it. Then each tried 4 - 5 times to make the ferry to get to the river right side of Eldorado below Bedhead. At this level the center is a big burly hole and the left has a nasty pocket downstream against the wall. The ferry was almost impossible, so I decided for the "scary ferry" move which was to surf a wave from river left to right directly above the center drop of eldorado. I made the ferry and down the slide on river right but flipped at the bottom directly into the backwash of the hole...immediately felt myself sucked back into the hydraulic and the beating began. Trying 2 rolls, neither which were successful, I then pulled the cord. For the first time ever I had the unpleasant experience of being in a body-recirculation for maybe 8 - 10 seconds but which felt like a whole lot longer than eternity. After the exhausting failed attempts at ferrying I was seriously out of gas and air. The only way I knew what was up and down was the occasional contact with bottom where I would try to push off and get to the surface. Finally by more of a decision of the hole than any action of mine I felt the chaos lessen and emerged about 20ft downstream of the hole gulping for air. With what small reserves I had left I got to the side and clung to the rock wall for a good 20 seconds before pulling myself out and then sat for another good minute or two calming myself down. I played it off when Chris finally found me and we went on a boat chase. We found the Huka and my paddle in the big eddy above pincushion, and went to finish the run.

Well, the eventfulness didn't end just yet, as Chris got stomped on in the hole of pancake which was also big and hungry today but he swam free, fortunately without the body-recirculation...

All in all we only ran about 4 rapids each, and each swam once. I'd say once the Gihon is only showing 4 seams or less on the Powerhouse bridge, my new option will be to walk away, and go to the NBL (North Branch of the Lamoille). We had looked at Waterman Brook and it was surprisingly too low. On the plus side, events like this are sometimes a good thing to remind you just how powerful a river is, and that sometimes you are gonna get beat up by it...it comes with the sport.

Borrowed from a Message Board Post from Scott Gilbert...

Details

Written by Allan Berggren

Category: Trip Reports

Published: 31 May 2009

Hits: 167

Organizer(s): Allan Berggren

Date: 2009-05-30

Kayakers (K1): Allan Berggren, Barre Pinske

Predominantly: Advanced WW

Water Level: Medium low

Painted Gauge Height (ft) e.g. '3.3': 1

I posted before about paddling the Mill Brook in Brownsville, Vt.

Water level was 1 at the covered bridge over the Black River in Downers, so Barre Pinske and I made the short run of the Black River gorge. He was in a playboat modified for creeking by adding upper deck flotation, and I was in my CFS. He got to lead through, which is always a thrill the first time.

On the Steep Features Hold Water Longer (SFHWL) principle, Barre and I drove 12 miles to the Big Feature Gorge of the Mill Brook north of Brownsville. Barre cut a couple logs (leaving a big one at water level which can be boofed at runnable levels), then I rock-hopped to get to the Big Smiley 12-ft slide/falls, then on to several smaller features before taking out 200 yds downstream, just below the bridge that carries Brook Rd across.

Local water, big fun.