Spokane

Alright, this is it. One of the things on the list to do while living out West was to learn whitewater kayaking. I've been on 7 rafting trips, loving it, but wanting the autonomy kayaking provides. Nothing worse than going by a big wave in the raft cuz the other people don't paddle well enough to steer. Also, with rafting you are restricted to rivers the rafting companies run, which is actually quite a small percentage of the possible runs.

Today was the day. As much as I've been looking forward to this, I was a bit nervous. We did some practice at the YMCA pool, covering the basic strokes, wet exits and just getting started with the roll. The strokes were easy for me, because of all the canoeing (flatwater) I did at camp way back and at my grandparents' house on a lake. Wet exits are straightforward. The roll is real tough and I only got about half an hour of practice. My second attempt miraculously was successful, but that was the only one.

Once we got to the river, we were immediately taught how to do an eddy turn. An eddy is basically an area behind any kind of obstruction where the water actually flows upstream. When rafting, eddies are the rest stops and getting in them is a piece of cake, just go straight in. In a kayak, an eddy is a trecherous spot waiting to flip you. To avoid flipping, you raise the edge of your boat away from the oncoming (new) current using your thigh braces. To pull into the main current, this is the upstream edge and to pull into the eddy it is the downstream edge. They had us do an eddy turn right off the bat. I went first reluctantly and flipped. Wet exit. The other students did too, including my friend James.

Eventually, I kind of got the hang of it. I flipped 5 times, no rolls. 4 of the flips were coming out of eddies, none going in because the eddy usually has a much weaker current. The other was when I went over the side of a wave instead of the top and it rolled me off its side. After this, I got even more nervous as we approached each rapid. I had gloves on, but I'm sure my knuckles were white. James actually threw a couple of rolls--very impressive.

This was a class II river, with one or two class III's. I had some fun in the waves, but my first-time anxiety made it a tough first day. Next time I hope I'll be more comfortable.

The section we did was the Spokane River between Barker and Sullivan Roads, ending right at the Y.