Continue reading »]]> This is the  translation of a Column i was writihg for germany’s Kanumagazin Last Year.
It was called toro’s TOP 10, and is about tips, tricks, and stories from my paddling life, from absolutely serious, to totally not.

So this is the first edition, printed in issue 5/2008.

(Original german version: PDF file)

01. Kneerest:

My first tip is about boat fitting.
The Kneerest. EVERY boat should have this!

A post about how to do this is already in the blog here, called
‘how to do it longer and better’

02. plant your blade before u pull!

An incredibly easy and efficient tip about paddle technique.
Plant your Blade first!
You can see this mistake being made by beginners and pro’s alike.
People begin to pull on their paddling strokes, before the blade is properly planted.
The Effect is like on a slipping tire: Not enough friction, water gets moved instead of the boat.
So make sure not to pull before that blade is fully submerged.
In the printed version, the caption of the Photo said “this is how to pull right”. well, it is obviously not! But maybe the guys in pre-print thought, this paddler can’t be wrong on such a basic concept…

03. a nice little coincidence

A few years ago, in the middle of Corsica’s dense bushes, searching a way to the upper Orbo Put-in, i found a pair of nice Sunglasses.
Another paddler must have lost them there, because there’s nobody else round there, except some free running pigs.

SO WHAT? read on…

04. a BIG coincidence

A Year later in Africa, on the white Nile, i broke those Sunglasses. So i asked a Paddler from London, who happened to be there at the time, if he had some Duct-Tape to fix them.
He did have some Tape for me, and also, he told me, that he’d lost such Sunglasses last Year in Corsica, except, his was in better shape…

05. The saw is the law

Who has not encountered a rapid, that needed to be portaged, just because of a silly tree?
The ultimate Solution against this is a folding Saw: »Big Boy«, made by Silky (silkysaws.com).

The barely 400 grams weighing Tool has a 360 mm Blade. With it’s long handle, it allows you to cut easily through a 30 cm Tree in under 5 Minutes.

06. Heli Shuttle Madness

If you’re on New Zealand’s South Island, and fly with Bruce Dendoo to the Hokitika River or so, then this is an adventure of it’s own. Especially if you have his story in mind, that you may have heard the night before:
Bruce is in a Bar, and makes a bet with a biker: Who will be the first to order a Beer in the next Town?
Bruce with his heli, which can fly straight, and faster, but is a bit away from the Bar, or the Biker, who has his bike just outside the Door?
Off course, Bruce was there ahead. So he decides to hover behind a building, and wait for the Biker.
But as the Biker comes around the Corner, Bruce hovers aside, into some electric wires, and the heli crashes.
Sounds like a wild story, but the fly up the River feels like the story might be true.

07. Flying high

I love freestyle. But my competitive freestyle days are over, and i can’t really pull off all these crazy cool aerial whatsoever’s.

But if you drive to Lyon’s Hawaii sur Rhone, and the gaugue is around 1000 m3/s, even the bouncy front surf will get you all that excitement, heartrace, bodyache that we ever search for.

08. The Paddlers Rollercoaster

I’m just back from the Teva Mountain Games in Italy’s Val Sesia.
And even though the water was low again, i have to make the Egua a big compliment.

The best »Fairness-to-Gradient-Rate« that i know.

09. The wise man’s Paddle

Not long ago, i had to learn again, that a breakdown Paddle belongs into the boat, not in the Car.
No matter how short the Canyon, if there are vertical walls, pack it in!
It was on one of the tributaries of the Rhine, where i live, where i needed some luck to find a way back to the Car, and my Breakdown. Watch the Video

10. Best Film

All through my paddling live i heard about the legendary Kayak off Everest, and of the Film, that exists.
Now there is a restored Version of that Film on DVD.
With new Interviews with the protagonists and other extras, »Dudh Kosi – Relentless River of Everest« gets my rating DVD of the Year.

Get a copy in your local Store, or directly from Dave Manby

Continue reading »]]> My kind of ‘open end’ trip in Southamerica has brought me to Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and now Brasil. To Brasil we came without any expectations or beforehand knowledge.
We just wanted to do some boardsurfing and make new plans, maybe cross north to Venecuela, and off course, see if we find some paddling.

So on the way to Florianopolis we turned off at the first interesting roadsign:
‘Rio Paranhana, Parque Aguas Vivas’
and before we knew it, we where hooked up with the super friendly locals at Brasil Raft.

Rio Paranhana gallery

The Rio Paranhana is a mellow little jugle creek, has a lot of Rafting, a Slalom Course, and was a nice introduction to jungle paddling, plus we got some info and contacts, on where to go next.

After a couple of days we left to spend some time boardsurfing near Florianopolis.
And now, after a few rivers more, we are in Iguaçu, waiting for a permit to paddle below the Iguaçu Falls!

So i got some time to soon report more.

Continue reading »]]> Sunday morning in the bakery, half asleep, aching body, we picked up the local newspaper, and were surprised to see us on the frontpage, almost bigger than soccer…

“When the Doubs is in flood, you have to pack up and go!” Now we remembered that with these words we explained to a lady from a newspaper, why we were here. We had forgotten about her, because the river had all our attention.

On Friday we did pack up and go. As we arrived at La Malate, there were only a few paddlers, an we had a good time, even though the enormous hole next to the wave made us a bit nervous.
As the wave was feeding quite a bit into that truck eater, we soon found out, that the hole was friendlyer than it looked. Still it was not a place anyone wanted to go to.

Towards the evening, we went up to La Scie, which was easyer, with eddy access and no frightening factor, but crowded.
Since we knew, that on sunday all freestylers would go down to La Malate, which was getting better with lower waters, we opted to search a river.

We heard something of the Source of the Loue, a Waterfall out of a Cave, so we went on.
Arriving there, we were a bit down as we saw, it was not the one we expected, we mixed up Loue and Lison…

But as the gorge below looked mellow but scenic, we decided to put on anyways. Scenic it was, but with ‘mellow’ we were wrong again. It was one of the best surprises we all ever experienced.
Three hours of great class IV to V, no portage, lots of read an run on maybe 20m3.
Unfortunately, we did not bring a camera, as we were expecting a rather lame run. WRONG!

Go there if you can, the gaugue in Vuillafans was around 60m3 during our run.

Continue reading »]]> With a “knee rest”, you can sit more relaxed and get better control.

read on for fitting instructions.

Some blah blah first:

When i go boating with friends, Physically, i am often the weakling of the group. Still, it seems that others get tired faster than me. I think my boat fitting has to do with it.

It was in 1998 or 1999, when i had a Prototype of Eskimo’s ZWO, that was so wide (over 70cm!), it could never fit me. So i started to glue in and cut more and more foam, until i came to a point, where the foam in the knee area also supported the outside of my knee from below.
It felt similar to the paddler-boat connection i had in my squirt boat, where you don’t have to hold the boat with the legs/knees, because the boat just fits like a glove.

From that day on, all my boats had this outside knee support, in different variations of length and angle. There emerged some approaches from manufacturers to that same goal as well, but i think they all had drawbacks, and over time i came up with the following system:

Fitting your boat with Knee rest:

i take/make a more or less square cube of foam, around 10 x 10 x 15cm edge
length, then i cut it short side diagonally in two, so i get lengthy triangles.

depending on the boats shape and the softness of the foam, i cut into
the largest surface, which will go onto the boat, so it can easyer adapt the boats shape.

a short side, or if there is a shortest side, will touch my knees outside.
Now i sit in, put the blocks in place, and mark the area.

Now i can glue them in with contact adhesive.

most probably, they will not be perfectly in the right place, so i cut them down or build them up, eg. with the thin, self-adhesive foam that comes with your pyranha…

now have fun, and tell me, if you’re really doing it longer and better.

tips:

• for testing, you can place the foam with double sided tape, but my experience is, that it will fall out after a few paddling sessions in the best case.
• remember that with all your paddling gear on, the fittings made for you in your shorts might be too tight.
• Problems with glueing? cleaning with alcohol, and then a primer of contact adhesive on both boat and foam, which you let rest for a hour or so, before applying the second layer for glueing can help.
• Also, a little roughing up with sandpaper of the boats affected area can improve the bond of your glue.

Continue reading »]]> I am way too lazy on reporting, but before i head off to norway next friday, i try to sum up and recall what happened:

March:
Still winter around us, i went with ron to check out some more of the Flem.
Video Clip on eyespot.com

April:
The water levels were quite low, but still we had fun easter in the Tessin:
First i met up with ron, luc and severin, and we run the upper gorge of the Rovana, which is known as unrunnable or better not to attempt, which seems to count only for higher flows.
What we found after difficult scouting is a deep canyon with good bedrock and boulders. It was way better than nothing, and with the great feel of the unknown.

Next we went on the classic lower Verzasca, which always is awesome, even if it is as low as 3 m3/s…

Finally we headed to the Ribo, which is quite famous for his big drop, but less known, there is much more, if you go higher.
We went up as high as the road reaches, and ran a drop there with really minimal flow.
Notice in the video how i am chased by the following water, which gets stopped by the boat…
The next day we ran the classic lower Ribo with the big drop, still on minimal water.

more Easter-Trip Photos by ron

May & June:
Since then, we paddled a lot, but did not take much images of it, except from the Plessur.
An incredible discovery, 6km of awesome, continuous boulder and gravel bed. Another completely unknown run in a so well known area, we really could not believe it…

see Image Gallery on kanuschule.ch

July:
Finally, last Saturday, we went to the Schöllenen, an ominous bedrock gorge on the River Reuss.
This Place is quite famous to all swiss people, for all the history behind it, and also for the impressive alpine scenery.
To a Paddlers eye, it really looks like California, but rather unrunnable on the first glance.
There are lots of rumors about the paddling there being awesome to impossible…
Sure is one thing, it is not too easy to hit it with reasonable flows.
But we were Lucky. In short, after the most complicated scouting- safety- and takeout- rope-work that all of us had ever done (5hours for 5 Paddlers to run the first Slide/Waterfall Combo, 3h for the remaining 2km), i think i have two new entries in my ‘top 10′ of the coolest rapids i know.

The Schöllenen Story told by Ron (german)
more Schöllenen Images by Ron

Youtube Clip

All Images by Ron Fischer

Continue reading »]]> Since my last post, some kind of winter did come by, we had a few good days in the snow, but i never stopped dreaming of paddling.
This weekend was rainy and warm again, so i called up two friends, ron and luc, and quickly we decided to head to marco schlink in freiburg, and go paddle in the black forest, where rivers generally only get water in wintertime.
I was specially excited, because it would be my first time in my AMMO S.
Friday morning we paddled the upper and middle Alb, a very nice gorge in pool-drop style.
In the afternoon, we paddled the lower Wehra at 1m, a very fast, ever-white no-eddy non-stop roadside-run, which tends to look more like fun than hard paddling. So it was only after the take-out that ron and luc understood why i talked them out of running the harder upper part, called parkinglot-run.

At night in Freiburg we mit Simon Hirter. On Saturday we went to the Murg and Hundsbach , which was nice too, but not too spectacular, and cold rainy weather.

The Highlight surely was on Sunday, where we were joined by mäx lang, and had marco, ron and Jakob take pictures.
First we went to the Prägbach, a very small creeklet, where we were scraping over rocks every few meters, and still it was very nice i think, because it had some nice drops in it, and i really loved the scenery, sun shining through moss covered trees and small bedrock canyons.

Next we went to the Wehra again, and with the Waterlevel dropped to 88cm or so, we decided to put in above the infamous parkinglot-run, which adds to the speed of the lower part some more gradient with distinct drops, and more holes to get stuck in.
Luc did not have a good day, and the second time that he got stuck in a hole and run over by simon hirter, he broke his paddle, and had to abort the run.
Mäx, me and Simon all had sweet lines, and big smiles when we arrived at the take-out.

Now there were already a few Reviews of the AMMO. To these, i can add, that for a 60kg rider like me, the AMMO S is a perfect fit. I also use the Burn M, but for what we did here, the AMMMO was perfect, obviously made for wet stairs like Prägbach and freeride-play like on the Murg, i also felt very good on the Vera, which was serious steep whitewater, i was never missing speed or volume, it was just perfect, and i got some jealous looks from my buddies )
First Drop on the Prägbach, Photo by Marco Schlink.

First drop on the Prägbach, Photo by Jakom Käfer.

Last drop on the Prägbach, Photo by Marco Schlink.

Last drop on the Prägbach, Photo by Marco Schlink.

the steep part on the Wehra begins… Photo by Jakob Käfer

Somewhere on the Wehra’s steeper part, Photo by Jakob Käfer

The Wehra ‘flattens out’, Photo by Jakob Käfer

For more photos and a report in german, visit Marco’s Site.

Ron also did put up some Images.

Continue reading »]]>

My new home is 250m from the Ski Station, and the season pass is here, but not jet the snow. While i wait for the snow to come, i have to talk some friends into it, that there are still some possibilities for paddling around. Now, i could convince some, and we even found an un-run stretch…

A little Creek, in some places consisting more or less of a long series of connected potholes, which normally is just a lot of quite unrunnable boiling white, seemingly never before got a paddlers attention in the wintertime.

Most of it is filled up with logjams, but i thought, some meters could be worth trying.
I got our group together, Franz, Sandro, Andrea, and another friend helping with rope skills.

After checking out the way out, and setting up safety, we gave it a try.

Yesss, sweet! after the first run, and then doing safety for Franz, i had to go again, we paddled only some 50 meters anyways.

Daylight started to fade away way too fast, so we had to leave the scene.

Excited by the fact, that we found such cool new Playgrounds in such a well known area, and knowing that the arrival of the Ammo promises even more fun on these small features, i started to look into a series of other small side-creeks.
If snowfall doesn’t set in soon, i will be able to report more.

Photos by Andrea M. Zarn.