Thursday, November 19, 2015

How Far Do You Have to Travel to Explore?

So I'm starting to run out of superlatives to describe the weekends I've been having recently! For years now I've been wanting to do some exploring and discover some of the runs that aren't paddled very often for myself. Now that I've got my own transport and no college work to do at weekends, this goal has started to come together. After two weekends of stepping things up I'm sitting here with a damaged ankle and there's a disfigured boat sitting out in the garden but oh well, I've got a week or two now to catch up on the blog, send some emails, and plan what rivers I want to paddle next! 

The most important piece of paddling kit; having the right crew around you! Around for the Cascades were Aoife Hanragan, Barry Loughnane, Cliodhna O'Donoghue, Lucien Scrieber, Mark Scanlon and Eoin Farrell. Huge thanks to Tom O'Donoghue for showing us around!

The first weekend of exploring kicked off on the Friday evening with a last-minute call by Dave Glasswell to run a race on the Owengar the next morning. For a last-minute event in a pretty remote corner of the country a great crew of paddlers showed up so fair play to everyone who made the journey down! We got there to find water levels low but runnable; just! That's the risk of running events in Ireland, you never know if the rain is going to show up or not and making the call to run an event is always a gamble. In the end we had a great day despite the water levels. We started off with a group run of the river so that everyone could get to know the lines, and then we did the race runs. The race was infuriating, but went well. The low levels meant there were unavoidable rocks everywhere, which meant lots of exhausting accellerating from standstill on the way down the river. In the end I avoided the rocks better than most people but still came home in second place, one second behind David Doyle. I guess more work will have to be put in before the next race! 

Nailing the boof on the second drop felt great! Photo by Barry Loughnane.

 After the race everyone paddled to the bottom of the river, I snagged a spin in Barry Loughnane's Zen (It goes well, it's not quite in it's element when there's no water in the river but it's super quick and grips nicely on eddylines!), and then word went around that the Flesk was running. So we went into full kayaker convoy mode and headed that direction, only getting slightly more lost than on the way towards the Owengar! We squeezed in two laps on the Flesk before it got dark, with a huge group of solid boaters. The levels weren't all-time, but it was a great crew to have on the water and a lot of fun was had!

The lead-in rapid before the big drop we did. This one is a lot of fun! Photo by Barry Loughnane.

After a pretty spectacular party on Saturday night we regrouped the next morning to have a meeting and come up with a plan for the day. A huge amount of rain had fallen overnight so the debate was to make the most of a guaranteed epic day on the Flesk, or go the opposite direction, go exploring and risk not paddling at all. In the end we had a democratic agreement to head for the O'Sullivans Cascades, we had all paddled the Flesk many times before and it was time to go looking for somewhere new! Although none of us had paddled the Cascades before, Tom O'Donoghue had been out for a look which was a great help when it came to finding the falls, which involves paddling across a lake and a hike up a hill through a forest. I could keep going but I'll let the pictures do the rest of the talking! There's a beautiful set of waterfalls up there, and we didn't even run the best of them! A trip back is definitely on the cards, when there's more water around and I've logged a bit more time building up skills on waterfalls! 

The cleanest of the big drops on the O'Sullivans Cascades. There's also an awesome triple-step drop that I really want to paddle sometime! Photo by Barry Loughnane.

By the Wednesday following that epic weekend, I had fully caught up on sleep and was starting to get tired of looking at the four walls of my office. By Thursday I had booked Friday off work and was wetting myself looking at the forecast that was coming together for the upcoming weekend! I made it to Limerick on Thursday in time to head to the UL pool session and after that was given no choice about heading to Costellos for the night! On Friday, the rain showed up, word went around and we headed to the Clare Glens for a couple of laps. It was my first time out on the river in a long time and a couple of the lads from Galway came down for the day. The standard of paddling on the water was the best I've seen in a long time, and it was great to watch everyone styling, boofing and freewheeling all around them! The highlight of the day was definitely seeing Mark Scanlon freewheeling Big Eas. I'm pretty sure no-one has tried that move before, and with good reason, the ledges on the way down are pretty scary! I've never done it before, and I'm not sure I will be trying it, but Scanlon nailed it no problem! After the Glens we headed up to Galway to drink some beer, make a plan for the next day once that was sorted we headed to the Roisin Dubh for the night. Which is pretty much the Costellos of Galway, it's brilliant! 

I'm still having trouble with embedding non-Youtube videos here, check this out instead! Big Eas Freewheel!

Despite the late night on Friday night, the potential for paddling some new rivers got us all out of bed bright and early the next morning and we headed towards county Mayo not sure exactly where we would end up boating. We started by checking out a potential first descent of a ditch out west but when we got there we decided there wasn't quite enough water to go for it. So we kept going towards the Seannafearruchain, which I wasn't disappointed about at all! Although it's not run very often, I have been hearing about this run for years, generally referred to as Little Norway, and it's been right at the top of the list of rivers I want to run since I ticked the Owengar off that list last year. On the hike up to the top of the river, which takes about an hour, it became obvious that this river wasn't going to disappoint! It's super steep, super continuous, super tight, and best of all there was a bit of water on it! It's the kind of river that would get cleaner with more water, but then it would get harder to get out of the water between rapids and eventually become unrunnable, long before the moves themselves become unmakable. As it was, the lack of eddies meant that we had to post people at the bottom of each rapid to catch people as they paddled past and help them out of the water! 

 
Barry Loughnane put together this video from the weekend, it really shows just how tight the Seannafarruchain is!

All was going well until we came across a drop-to-slide arrangement maybe a third of the way down the river. Although most of the group had the intellegence to walk around it, myself and Mark Scanlon took a look and decided to go for it. After looking at it individually, we both came up with totally different approaches to the drop. I decided it would be best to land on the slide nose-first, to eliminate the possibility of damaging my back by landing flat on the slab, while Mark decided the best idea was to land flat but leaning forward. In the end I was caught out by a horizontal ledge in the rock I was landing on, which brought my boat to a dead stop when I hit it. Check out the video below, it's pretty funny! Mark's line only went slightly better, when he landed his face hit the cockpit of his boat, bursting his lip and damaging his nose. The blood looked pretty impressive at the time, and his lip was pretty swollen afterwards, but not enough to stop him getting the shift that night so it's all good! The force of the impact when I landed bent the nose of my boat, smashed my footblock and sprained my ankle. Not a lot of fun, since it meant I had to walk down this hillside that had taken so much work to climb up in the first place, while watching the lads running epic rapids all the way down! I got lucky in fairness, to be able to walk out at all. It was the kind of crash that could have had much worst results! A week or two off to let the ankle recover and I'll be back to do the rest of that river, it looks like awesome craic! Since I had killed any chance of boating the next day, that evening we joined a gang of NUIG OFBs heading up to Leitrim to party with the rest of the club. Those guys certainly know how to party and they've got a great gang of people around at the moment, the night was great craic and I'm looking forward to getting out again over New Years!

Another link, I still cringe every time I see it! Ouch!

So that's about it at the moment! Plans for the next few weeks are contingent on how that ankle heals up, so I havn't made any yet. The next big-big event that's coming up is paddler's New Years, and I hope to be well back in action by then. Hopefully it won't take anywhere near that long, I reckon another week or so off and it should be all good. Fingers crossed! Once that sorts itself out the plan is to try to keep travelling to new rivers around the country, it's not so common for the time and the transport and the right people to all be available so I'm hoping to make the most of it! 

Last but not least! There really are some gorgeous drops in that forest! Photo by Barry Loughnane.