![]() ![]() I jealously watched my new girlfriend comfortably demo a Dagger RPM-which later became the sixth kayak I paddled. I was too tall for this whitewater demo, but I stubbornly crammed inside anyway and spent the whole day hurting. Photo: The author and his wife paddling their Pyranha Fusions on Wambaw Creek in Francis Marion National Forest, S.C. But lacking the ability to consistently roll upright, I still swam plenty of rapids. By now, I’d learned how to paddle full speed ahead through rapids, which worked 80 percent of the time. This whitewater boat was cutting edge at the time, but my hardshell kayaking still wasn’t. The fourth kayak I paddled was a Wave Sport Godzilla. With each mile, we were getting the hang of reading water and navigating rapids. A group of us guides took them on a trip across Northern California to rivers like the McCloud, Trinity, and Klamath. The third kayak I paddled was an inflatable ducky. But we were clearly having fun, so why stop? We were nothing like the skillful kayakers I’d witnessed as a boy. After hard-knock swimming with our yaks to shore, we drained them, laughed it off, tried again. We smacked boulders and holes broadside, flipped over, wet exited. Though my new rafting friends and I had no idea how to kayak, we careened down the Gorge rapids anyway. While paddling whitewater was challenging and did carry risks, it wasn’t nearly as impossible as the cocky guide had declared six years before. By now, I was a first-year raft guide on the Gorge section of the South Fork American. This 11-foot boat was manufactured from rotomolded plastic in the mid-1990s, but it wasn’t until 2001 when I paddled it into the current. The second kayak I ever paddled was for whitewater-a massive red Perception Corsica. Eventually, the others were out of sight, so I gave up and chased after them. As the others turned downstream, I kept paddling into the current, trying to reach the rapids. Three of us paddled upstream for several miles until the turnaround point, a riffle too swift to ascend. I hopped inside a big yellow boat and off we went. Still, I was excited to finally paddle any kind of kayak. ![]() But the kayaks were clearly flatwater rec boats, and our destination was a mellow section of the Lower American. ![]() I eagerly agreed, hoping it might involve easy whitewater. Later that summer, my aunt’s boyfriend invited me to go kayaking. Somehow, this mythical figure could sniff out whitewater potential, and I clearly had none. “Much harder than it looks,” he said, launching into a dispiriting lecture about how difficult it is to become a raft guide and, even more challenging, a kayaker.īeing an impressionable kid, I accepted the guide’s dismissive claims. As our raft plowed through fun rapids, I watched skillful kayakers dipping their blades, swiveling their torsos, and expertly maneuvering sleek boats through crashing hydraulics. We were on the class III Gorge section of the South Fork American River in California, and I was around 14 years old. THE FIRST TIME I EVER WANTED TO TRY kayaking was during a guided raft trip with the Boy Scouts. Tracing a lifetime of adventures on the water in 25 boats ![]()
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