Best Event of the Year?

So the whitewater season has kicked off with an almighty bang with Cranafest, up in deepest darkest Donegal! What makes this event great is that it caters for everybody, regardless of experience or ability.  With beginner, intermediate and advanced competitions in boaterX, freestyle and slalom and a huge variety of coaching sessions from some of the best instructors in the country, everybody is guaranteed to have a brilliant weekend. This event has been going for a few years now and has been growing and growing, with the organisers always trying to go one better than the previous year. last year they introduced a raft race (which was a massive success; it wasn't until this year's event that some egos recovered from it!) and this year it was the Wavesport moonlight challenge, a night time time trial over the main drop on the river, the Claw.

 

This picture of Barry Loughnane sums up the weekend pretty well; good water levels, great crowds, nice weather and a great section of river...all in all a pretty epic weekend. Photo by Tom O'Donoghue.

The night time trial was brilliant craic. It was restricted to competitors in the expert boaterX but that was still 120 people, so it still took a few hours to run through everyone! There was a brilliant atmosphere at it, with everyone out having the craic and supporting each other. It was probably the shortest race we've ever had, times were around 25 seconds so every bit of the race was crucial, any kind of a stall on the start ramp or at the bottom of the claw and you would be finished! Lots and lots of big names came through and it was impossible to call who was ahead however right at the end Neil Slevin and Cian McNally hit lines that put everyone elses to shame and made everyone look pedestrian in comparison! In the end Cian won, with Shane Little in 2nd and Neil in 3rd. I felt like I had a pretty good run so I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of the results!

I won't go into details about the rest of the weekend, but basically UL brought a caravan and 13 people, drove for 6 hours, went for pints, crashed at a GAA pitch, competed in freestyle, slalom, the Dagger Dash and Wavesport timetrial, partied hard, raced in various boaterXs, went to a prize giving, collected a bunch of medals and drove 6 hours home. And then slept for about a week!

The lads had some great results, Jack won the mens sport freestyle and Jemma won the womens; and Sam came 2nd in the intermediate boaterX. Pretty respectable for their first kayaking event! I came 2nd in Div 1 slalom which I was very surprised at, and 2nd in the expert boaterX which is pretty sweet! As is always the case with boaterX luck played a pretty big part all day but hey, I'm not going to complain when it goes my way!

Drama towards the end of the expert boaterX final! Despite the rock Wongy managed to hold on and take the win. Photo by Tom O'Donoghue.

Liffey Descent & MPL

Just a super quick one since I'm under pressure with college work...last weekend the Liffey Descent took place, as I'm sure everyone reading this is aware! Great weather and great water levels on the day made for a great event, and all the usual faces were there so there was some good banter in the carpark before the race!

As my first year competing as a senior I decided to try to start with a bang. I took ULKC's Gola Sprint out on flatwater for 10 minutes a week before the race and since I didn't fall over I decided to do the race in it! I had great plans at the time to get out training a few times that week to get used to the boat but college got in the way of all that and I went into the race only having paddled the boat for those 10 minutes a week before! It all got off to a less than spectacular start when I fell over while waiting for our class to be allowed down to the start line! Thankfully I was able to grab Jack's boat and T-rescue and save myself from swimming but it was a bad sign for the rest of the race!

I wobbled my way down the river and it was all going relatively well until we reached Lucan. Myself, Kev Cahill and another lad were pretty much neck and neck all the way and the pace we were setting was pretty tough! At Lucan however, everything literally fell apart! I made a mess of the line on the high drop, and didn't turn the boat sideways enough. The boat bridged at the bottom of the weir and folded in half, putting one massive crack across the hull and matching one in the deck. My first instinct was to hop out and call it quits but since the boat didn't instantly sink I decided to keep going and see how it went. The next few weirs were a bit interesting with the boat half full of water and I had to empty the boat three times between Lucan and the finish line.

With all this emptying I obviously lost the two lads, but thankfully the three of us had buit up such a big lead over the rest of the field that I was just able to hold onto 3rd! Not a bad result at the end of the day, and hopefully I can come back next year and go one or two better!

This weekend the first night of this season's Munster polo league was held at UL Arena pool. With teams entered from Galway, Dublin, Cork, Kilkenny and of course Limerick it looks like it's going to be a good competition! The Div B matches were played and ULKC was represented by a team of extremily enthusiastic and talented first years who just started kayaking a few weeks ago! They tore the place up and are now sitting in first place in the league on goal difference! Already they're moving and passing like a proper polo team so it's going to be great to see how they're doing by the end of the season!

In Div A, we achieved the remarkable feat of carrying on our 100% record from last season of loosing every game! In a tight game against Misfits, what was almost a 3-3 draw became a 4-3 loss after a last ditch shot and some shoddy refereeing that resulted in us thinking the game was over before the ball was thrown. In our other match against Kamakazi, we were comprehensively thrashed, showing that some serious training is needed before the next night of competition!

Looking forward to next weekend, Crana fest is coming up and that promises to be one of the events of the year with competitions in just about every discipline imaginable! We've got a big crew going up from UL so it's going to be an awesome weekend! Before then, I'd better get a bit of study done, 4th year of Engeering really isn't designed to let you go away kayaking every weekend!