Run more rapids while staying dry

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/09/2015 (3435 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PAKTIKONIKA RAPIDS, Man. — It’s a gloomy mid-August morning and the wind is howling loud enough to drown out almost anything.

That’s why the approach to Paktikonika Rapids is ominous. This drop on the Hayes River, a few kilometres downstream from Knee Lake, rumbles a few hundred metres away.

At the lip of the rapids, it’s a roaring monster. There’s a wide drop at the top, followed quickly by an equally broad but steeper descent that amounts to one big standing wave, with an ugly canoe-swallowing hole at the centre.

“I think we can do this,” says Chris Debicki, the paddler in the stern of my 16-foot Royalex boat. A risk-taker by nature, he’s paddled 10 whitewater rivers and isn’t freaked out by the prospect of two people in a lone canoe running big water without a spotter or safety boat.

“No effing way,” I say in response, using an adjective stronger than effing.

I had paddled only two whitewater rivers prior to the Hayes and was terrified by the torrent at the top.

Hap Wilson, author of Wilderness Rivers of Manitoba, calls Paktikonika Rapids a Class III-IV boulder-basher.

“Take your lumps on the portage,” he advises.

Chris, however, wants to tackle the drop.

I insist on scouting the entire set of rapids, which includes two more downstream rapids.

I walk the portage trail. The second drop is a straightforward Class II descent if we keep to river left. The third is wide and strewn with boulders, some of them big pyramids. There’s no clear channel around the rocks, but there’s also no big water. The worst that could happen there is a bit of bump and grind.

But the drops at the top continue to frighten me. Chris admits they scare him, too. But there’s a clear line through the upper rapids, with no boulders in the way or holes at the bottom if we maintain that line.

We’re also on the first trip of my life in a canoe outfitted with a spray deck, which sheds most of the water from standing waves.

So I agree to run a rapid I initially refused to even consider running, partly because I want to see what a spray deck can actually do.

We ensure everything inside the boat is fastened to a thwart or seat. We have a line ready in the event we dump and have to self-rescue.

We paddle upriver and get ready to hit the drop. Chris takes a nice, clean line into the first V.

The larger one arrives in seconds. “Paddle hard!”

Chris screams as we hit the standing wave, which rushes over the bow and around me.

On the other side, we’re not just upright but completely fine. The two spare paddles on top of the spray deck remain fastened in their sleeves by strips of Velcro.

There’s also very little water in the boat, which would have been swamped immediately if it wasn’t covered.

The rush of adrenaline is nothing less than euphoric. That’s what happens when fear is followed by relief.

My initial screams of joy are followed by knowledge our decision also saved us time and energy. By running this scary-looking rapid, we avoided the need to carry our canoe and gear along a 170-metre portage.

During an eight-day trip along the Hayes, neither Chris nor I ended up carrying that canoe over our heads at all. Thanks to the spray deck — as well as late-season low water that turned some scary rapids into more manageable drops — we wound up running all but three sets of rapids.

We carried twice, each for fewer than 75 metres, shlepping the canoe and gear around a pair of small waterfalls. We also lined the boat around one Class IV ledge that didn’t look doable in low water.

Thanks to the spray deck, we ran all the Class III rapids and a few Class IV-ish drops, largely because we could do what open canoes can’t — plow through standing waves.

Canoes rarely dump in rapids just because turbulence upsets the boat. Open canoes often go under because they start filling up with water, become tougher to manoeuvre and finally swamp.

Whitewater paddlers in open canoes find the sweet spot between the deepest channel — where biggest waves are — and water too shallow to traverse. Admittedly, this takes great skill.

As a bit of a hack, I appreciate the ability to hit deep water and allow the waves to roll along the boat. It’s easier, but it can lead to complacency.

The only time we dumped on the Hayes, we chose not to scout a Class II ledge. We wound up crossing it at a sharp angle, allowing gravity to flip me out of the bow before I could brace.

The self-rescue, in nearby shallow water, turned out to be easy. The humbling misstep was useful, as it ensured we scouted more thoroughly down the line.

It also wasn’t significantly more annoying than a self-rescue in an open boat. Soaked to the bone, we also stayed somewhat warm in the canoe for the rest of the day, because the deck acts like a layer of insulation.

The bottom line: a spray deck doesn’t confer magical powers on paddlers, such as protecting them from dumb decisions. But it can make a whitewater trip more fun by making it possible to run more sets of rapids.

The investment was worth it for my Hayes River trip.

Hell, it was worth it for the rush of running Paktikonika Rapids alone.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca