Galwayfest 2015!

Last weekend saw the fourth edition of Galwayfest, the annual whitewater, freestyle and party epic hosted by Barry Loughnane, Andrew Regan and the rest of the NUIG crew. This is always an awesome event; water levels are relatively reliable and the locations are suitable for paddlers of virtually any level. Being able to have a big party in the middle of Galway on Saturday also brings a lot to the event! Unfortunately this year Galwayfest clashed with slalom and wildwater events happening in other parts of the country. This meant that numbers were slightly down on previous years but most of the usual faces managed to make it down for the weekend and the weekend was certainly good as ever!

As usual, the event kicked off on Saturday morning with a time trial on the Boluisce river. Relatively benign weather meant that you could hang around and have a bit of craic before the race started without freezing your nuts off, which was a great improvement on varsities a few weeks before! All the usual banter was had about who was going to set the fastest time and everyone was well up for the challenge of beating Barry Loughnane for the first time on his home run! A really cool addition this year was a live timing system, where people at the bottom of the river could see the results coming in as they happened. I was on rescue for the start of the race, and when I paddled down the river to go back for my race run I found out that Barrry was sitting in first place with a solid ten second lead over second. I knew that it was going to take an all-or nothing approach to even come close to Barry's time and although I had a relatively clean race run it wasn't nearly enough. The standard on the day was ridiculusly high; on the Boluisce it really helps to be local and know the river well and it's a long enough race that paddling fitness plays a bigger role than the likes of Ennistymon. In the end my months of sitting in front of a computer working on my final year project did me no favours and 6th place was the best I could manage. Not the result I was hoping for but no matter, there was still plenty of racing to go! In the end no-one could put in a time to match Barry's, we're going to have to wait till next year for another opportunity to knock him off his throne!

This year for the first time the lads added a team race to the event schedule, which was a great call! Teams of four people, you start together and your time stops when the last team member crosses the finish line. My concience isn't exactly clear about being in a team with Aran Kilroy, Neil Slevin and Cian McNally paddling three Pyranha 9Rs and an Exo 6; three of the fastest paddlers in the country paddling the fastest boats we could get our hands on! But the prize that was up for grabs was a crate of beer sponsored by the Independent Brewing company so we had to go all out! We won the team race in the end, and I'm really looking forward to trying out the beer as part of the FYP handup celebrations on Friday week! ...the race-specific boats are starting to show up in force at the whitewater events now, and the number of Pyranha 9Rs, Exo 6s and Jackson Zens in the carpark is starting to get a little worrying! I thought they couldn't be much faster than regular boats, but after paddling the Exo 6 unfortunately that's not the case! It's significantly faster over flat water than the XT, and carries more speed through rapids too, which is going to add up to a significantly better time over a five minute race run. The tradeoff for all that speed is that it is less fun to paddle, it doesn't carve into eddys like the XT, and I found myself having to steer down the race course using sweep strokes instead of using the rails like I would in the XT. It is a lot more forgiving though, the rails don't catch on rocks like more agressive boats do, and it doesn't catch you out if you go through a hole on a slightly wrong edge. All in all, great boat for racing but doesn't really have the feeling that I like for paddling day-to-day.

After the team race it was time for a boaterX between the top six people in the whitewater event. Myself, Barry Loughnane, Aran Kilroy, Shane Little, Cian McNally and Dave Holden headed up to the top of the river for the last time. To try and increase the chances of a bunch of us hitting Poll Gorm at the same time and causing total carnage we paddled most of the way down the river before starting the race. The race started Le Mans style, with us starting on the bank about 10 metres away from our boats, and on Go running to them, hopping in and sprinting down the river. In the end Barry looked like he'd done some shneaky practise and took a flying leap into his boat and was gone before most of us had even realised the race had started! I got onto the water in third, after tripping over a rock on my way to the water that was invisible under all the gorse bushes! The trick to these races is knowing when to put on your spraydeck. If you do it on the bank then you're wasting loads of time, if you do it early in the race there's a risk of people passing you but you don't fill up with water, if you leave it till later in the race you can build a bit of a gap between you and the lads behind but you're constantly filling up with water as you're paddling through rapids with no deck! I played it fairly well, passing someone when they stopped to put their deck on and finishing in second behind Barry. Another advantage of the Six for this kind of thing is that it stays super high going through rapids, I only put my deck on just before the bigger rapids at the end of the race and didn't fill up with too much water before that. Since it's the boaterX results that count towards the overall ranking I was happy enough going into Sunday's freestyle comp.

After a brilliant, slightly hazy night out in Galway we travelled out to Tuam the next morning to find prime levels, not too much wind and sunshine in between the hail showers...about the best conditions you can get for a Tuam comp! With tunes provided and a chilled out, jam style format a great day was had on the water. A few of the UL crew who came along had done very little hole paddling and made great progress during the competition, and I think a lot of other people there were the same. The jam style format really gives everyone a chance to go out and experiment and push themselves, much better craic than the ICF 45 second ride format! In the expert division Barry was untouchable, with all the time being put in on the water very obviously paying off for him! My freestyle abilities are also obviously developing in proportion with the time I'm spending on the water and I finished well down the field. Still, it was good enough for joint fourth place overall with Shane Little, with Aran Kilroy in second overall and Andrew Regan in third. Barry was again in a league of his own with convincing wins in both whitewater and freestyle. Huge thanks to Barry, Andrew and everyone else who helped out with the event, and to Aran Kilroy for the sofa space on Saturday! It was another awesome event, and I'm looking forward to doing it all over again this time next year! Next up on the calender is trials for the freestyle team going to the world championships in Canada next summer. That's an event that I'd love to be able to go to but competition for places is going to be fierce. We'll give the trials a go anyway and see how it goes, some of the moves learned in Uganda over the summer might still be there, buried in muscle memory somewhere!