Amazing beatdowns

Hey, my name is Alexander Szostalo. I am 15 years old and this is my 2^nd session at keeners. I'm from Ottawa, Ontario pretty close by the Ottawa kayak school. I'm going to talk about my day on Thursday, big water bacon beatdown day. This may sound scary but the point of this day is not to kill yourself but to challenge yourself in ways you haven't before. Like running lines you haven't done before, I DEFINITELY did that, or surfing places you haven't surfed before.


SO I woke up in the morning, put on my running shoes and went for a run. Earlier this week our keener mom, Anna, told all the keeners that she had been seeing bears around Keenerville. I only ran 2 kilometers but it was the scariest run I have ever done. ANYWAYS later that morning we had our morning keener activity and went to get breakfast. I had a huge breakfast, egg, bacon, steak and cheese sandwich. After that we got straight into the water. That day, since it was big water beat down day, we had a very long warm-up led by Joel Kowalski, Devyn Scott and Juanito De Ugarte from Peru. Since we have a pretty strong group, our head coach, Joel, decided that everyone was going to run the main channel. Before we paddled downstream, we went up to McCoy's chute. This rapid is usually pretty easy to run, class 3, but there are two big features on it; Phil's and Satler's . These are two holes that you can get caught in for quite a while. So of course, that is exactly what all the keeners go into.


After getting beatdown a little bit in Phil's we decided to head downstream toward the second rapid, the Lorne. There are two parts to this rapid, a top 'safe' part, and a bottom 'not so safe' part. The easiest line for this rapid is to go straight on the tongue for the top part and gently cruise to the far right side all the way down avoiding buseater, or mini bus, two massive holes. The line some keeners and I decided to run was straight threw mini bus. Now don't get me wrong, we aren't plunging into are deaths using this line, there is a small tongue you can punch to get threw safely. BUT if you miss the line and go REALLY far left into mini bus then you are in for some fun. Can anyone guess what I did? It was one of the biggest beat downs I have had in a while. As I was paddling down I saw Devyn desperately telling me to paddle right, didn't really work out for me. I was surfing mini bus uncontrollably for about 20 seconds before I pulled. After looking at the video I've been beating myself over it since I swam right as I got flushed out o the hole.



After that intense beatdown and lunch, we paddled down to my favorite rapid, Butcher's Knife. It is called this because there are sharp rocks on the right side of the rapid. There are also some amazing whirlpools in an eddie close to the top of this rapid. I got sucked in one pretty good, my boat was completely under water. After that wonderful day we got back to Kennerville, and I had a pretty good and relaxing evening. Thanks for reading!