By Dave Mainer
The amazing group of students of the 2015 Whitewater 101 Class session “B” all graduated with honors on Sunday, June 21st. This session had 6 canoeists in 4 boats – 2 tandems and 2 solos. This was a 4 day class conducted over 2 consecutive weekends between June 13th and 21st. There was an earlier session “A”, a 2 day course, which we conducted back in April for an equally amazing but smaller group of students, Todd Bohle and Jenny Brown who took the class in their Mad River tandem.
After last year’s cold weather, we made the decision to push the dates from late April - early May out until mid-June for this year’s class when we predicted that we’d have better weather. Better weather we had - in spades! All 4 days were great; sunny and warm - ideal for getting wet and messing around in boats. What we never would have predicted was that in June we wouldn’t have much water – but everything turned out great nevertheless!
For our first session, we met on Lake Sammamish in the morning and reviewed strokes and did some paddling drills to get warmed up and baseline our vocabulary and technique. After lunch, we headed down to the Cedar River at Landsburg for some “park and play”. We practiced ferries, peel outs and eddy turns in some very “thin” current.
For day 2, we met at the “Powerhouse” section of the Snoqualmie which was running at mid-August flow but it was just perfect for our class. We often say that the river will ultimately be the best teacher and in this case it offered a nice selection of features to comfortably learn with. There was enough current to work on ferries and the eddies were good enough to learn and practice peel-outs and eddy turns. This section is only a half-mile long but we made full use of it spending a good 5 hours working on drills and skills.
Limited in our selection of rivers, the class chose to return to the “Powerhouse” for days 3 and 4. The river continued to drop slightly each day but it still offered good opportunities for playing and learning. On the last day Leslie and Don gave the students the opportunity for some throw rope practice by volunteering themselves as targets. Familiarity breeds confidence and as it turns out, all of our students found it incredibly valuable being able to return to the same “workshop” each day to practice honing their new skills. By the end of day 4, the entire class was super excited about not only catching eddies they never thought possible but thinking of rapids in a whole new way – being able to paddle down a rapid in control by “hopping” from eddy to eddy. They also learned and practiced bracing and some self-rescue skills.
We had a fantastic group of hard working students for this 4 day class. All of them improved a huge amount and it was an absolute treat for the instructors to have such a talented and enthusiastic class. Janiene Licciardi, Katie Novak were in solo canoes and in tandem boats we had Becca Polglase and Emily White in an Old Town Discovery and Jen-Shen Liu and Sarah Jones in a gorgeous, handmade cedar strip Prospector. Sarah had to abandon after the first weekend due to other commitments and over the course of the second weekend, Jen demonstrated an amazingly broad set of solo skills by paddling kneeling, sitting and even standing up.
An incredible amount of thanks go out to instructors Peggy Mainer, Idamay Curtis, Alan Hall and to Howard Young, George Wilhelm, Linda Newman, Don Cheyette, Jim Lawton, Helen Buttemer for helping support the class. An even greater amount of appreciation goes to Leslie Mix for being the training coordinator as well as providing support on the river!