Playak Weekly Digest - week 08

Playak Weekly Digest
A digest of the world's most popular paddling headlines in week 08, 2010.

News Watch Headlines

***** Sunday 14th - Playak: Review: This Is The Sea 4 The format of the TITS-DVDs is a mix of shorter items about interesting kayak-personalities and special seakayak destinations, followed by some longer features about seakayak-expeditions. In every next DVD this format evolved to a higher level: the picture quality, the camerawork and the story-lines got better every time. TITS 4 topped it and won the most prestigious awards in the world of outdoor-filming.

***** Friday 26th - Adrian Tregoning: Sungai Lambai – Jungle Creek! Part 2 I went up and got into my boat. Hugh gave me the signal to wait and I assumed Andrew was getting into position to video and for safety, as the next rapid was just below. My heart started beating while waiting around. After what was probably less than a minute I was given the go ahead and dropped in. It was one of the more intimidating rapids that I've run but I felt good. I lined up and boofed into the pressure area and charged out no problem.

***** Sunday 21st - Adrian Tregoning: Luke Longridge on the Upper Sabie – a swim for my birthday I've always assumed that at some point in my life, I have paddled the upper Sabie at low water. Turns out I was wrong, and have only ever paddled it really full. Until this time. It was very low, which was probably a good thing, because I was paddling rather poorly. We ran all the rapids on the U2 section, and Hugh Twice caught me out a little.

**** Thursday 25th - Adrian Tregoning: Sungai Lambai – Jungle Creek! Part 1 Thursday, 19 November. Breakfast was some cake type stuff, and something similar to what we called vetkoek, neither of which appealed me so I wolfed down some monkey nuts and that was that. It was partly cloudy and quite hazy, it looked like it was to be a hot day. But no matter, another day of excellent kayaking lay ahead of us!

**** Thursday 18th - Team LiquidLogic: Jefe performs as Playboat On Calancasca river at a high level I tested the playboat performance of my Jefe. And yes it works well. I started with a nice entry move which is called Deep Diver going directly into a nice cartwheel.

*** Sunday 14th - Jackson Kayak: Surfing at Kelly's Whitewater Park I had the first surf in Kelly's Whitewater Park yesterday. I cannot believe it is here! The photo of the island and feature four is from a couple weeks ago while under construction. The rest of the photos are from yesterday. We surfed with about 300 to 400 cfs. The features are already fun to surf. I cannot wait for more water.

*** Thursday 18th - Trent Thibodeaux: Rio Claro The run is basically waterfall after waterfall after wallfall, all good-to-go. There are a couple of mandatory and unscoutable drops but it all goes and just adds to the excitement. The entré saltos section has the coolest rapid I have ever paddled, the "Garganta" aka swirly bird drop. After this is more tight slots, waterfalls and at one point we entered a dark hallway and when we rounded the corner a huge 70-80 foot waterfall was pouring in on the side.

*** Monday 15th - Adam Johnson: Rio Florin Stouts… After spending several weeks in Pucon, it was time to venture outside of the immediate creeking wonderland (what EG calls "Babylon") and onto rivers farther south.

*** Sunday 21st - Go-Kayaking: See Our Guide On How To Outfit Your Kayak!! Fitting in the boat is all about being snug and comfortable (very important) in the boat and not being able to move around in it too much. So the three points of contact are very important.

*** Monday 22nd - PeakUK US: Rio Claro The Rio Claro in Northern Chile is just simply amazing. The run is close to Santiago making it the perfect first day run for our Chile trip. Most know it for the famed 7 teacups, but upstream are some of the most amazing gorges and still more insanely perfect waterfalls to be run.

*** Thursday 25th - Fraser Valley WW: Vancouver Island Video 2010 This is a short video from paddling on the island in the winter of 09/10. It's the first FVWW video of the year and I'm sure it won't be the last, probably not the last island video either. There is some footage of the big slide and falls on the Ash River as well as some from Hemingston Creek and a couple clips from the Cameron River by Port Alberni.

** Saturday 20th - Astral Currently: Asheville Goes to Overflow A few cold and snowy weekends ago I had the opportunity to paddle the Overflow Creek for the first time with a group of friends from Asheville. Its an incredible creek run with some really cool drops, and as we quickly learned its not a run to let your guard down as almost every drop has some type of hazard.

** Tuesday 23rd - Jackson Kayak: Stephen's photos from Rock Island Falls and Sieve City Clay, Dane, EJ, Nick and I headed out today in the cold to run the Falls and Sieve City. We all padded our Villain S 2.0 prototypes-great boat, great boofs, great times!

** Friday 19th - Fraser Valley WW: Ash River, Vancouver Island, B.C. The Ash River on Vancouver Island is a hydro controlled river. It doesn't usually release water in early February but that's exactly what it was doing while we were there on a three day boating tour for Curtis' Birthday. We're not sure why there was such good flow but we weren't going to complain. The flows were so good actually that the reservoir was spilling over the top of the dam allowing us to run the big ramp out of the lake into a small pool and off a clean 15 footer.

** Saturday 20th - CKS Blog: The Astral Green Jacket LE2 The Astral Green Jacket's been around the block a few times. It's really comfortable, lasts along time and is burly enough be your "go to" jacket for big Class V trips. Of all the PFD manufacturer's out there, Astral seems to be the one that is continually trying to progress into the next realm of quality, style and overall coolness. The Green jacket LE and LE2 are great examples of this.

The Playak Weekly Digest is a special Saturday version of the News Flash, containing the most popular paddling news of the past week. To see all the latest headlines, videos, forum discussions and more, visit Playak News Watch.
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