This morning I did 42 minutes of run 2/walk 1 minute. I got up early and was out of the door for 7.20 am. Found it a little more difficult than last time I went out but hopefully that is just a blip. The weather was cooler than of late but not raining. The streets were pretty quiet thankfully.
When I got back I got my canoeing gear ready as we were off up to the Washburn Valley to go whitewater rafting.
This is the reservoir that feeds the white water area. The bottom of the dam wall is where this starts.
Our canoe club, West Yorkshire Canoe Club, pay for the water to be released from a reservoir so we have guaranteed whitewater no matter what the weather has been doing.
We arrived and got ready fairly quickly and soon found we were in the next raft to go down. Steve Thorley-Lawson was guiding this one and after the briefing we were on the water. It was a fairly sedate journey down but we still got wet. Right at the last minute we went down a small weir and the passenger in front of me lost her balalnce and went overboard. In getting her back in we miss the disembarkation area so had to go a bit further downstream to where we used to get out. Luckily the van had seen it happen so came down to the car park to pick us up.
Second time down we went with George Harrap who is fairly new to guiding on his own but is due to take an assessment for it in October so wanted as much practice as possible. This time there was Chris, Paul, Peter and myself in so we had a right laugh. The ride was fairly tame though. When we got to the exit area, Peter jumped out to pull the boat in and didn't realise it was going to be so deep at the edge so went for a complete ducking.
There was a bit of a wait for the next go so we had some lunch and coffee and then wandered back up to the starting point. We got George again! This time he wanted to do a classic run, so no bumping or trying to get us out of the boat. He did some surfing in one of the bigger weirs though as he wanted to perfect the technique. We all survived this journey intact.
Fourth time around we managed to get Heath who is a complete headcase. He knew we were up for a bit of fun. He purposely hit every rock and tree possible and when it came to the weirs he tried his hardest to get us to tip someone out. Luckily I mostly spotted which way he was leaning and leaned the opposite way to counterbalalnce the raft. Having said that Peter did go overboard and hung on by a toe loop in the boat and I managed to pull him back in.
Heath then got Peter to jump into the front of the boat and we went over the big weir. He then turned the boat around and we paddled upstream and into the bottom of the weir and Peter got absolutely soaked by the freezing water. He then tried tipping the raft up in an eddy but again I counterbalanced this and he failed. We reached the bottom intact again.
We waited for the van to pick us up but this time there was all three rafts and a load of canoeists. I managed to jump into the front of the van thankfully and so did Sandra. Ken was driving but we had no idea how many people were in the back of the van with the canoes (the rafts and paddles were on a trailer). We counted people out, including us in the front, there were 22 of us in a Mercedes Sprinter van!!!! Health and Safety would have a field day with us.
After that I called it a day. It was raining hard and I was quite damp by then so starting to feel a bit cold.
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