Keener road trips

Being at Keeners, we are on the Ottawa river every day, and we get to know the river pretty well, and are fore the most part, quite comfortable on it. We understand how safe the river is, so it is harder for us to understand other dangerous aspects on a river. Going on a road trip to a different river changes all of this. Different rivers have different hazards, different water levels, and different features that we have to spend more time scouting, which helps improve our judgement as kayakers. This year, we went to the Upper Petawawa for the first time. While it might not be as high volume as some of the other Keener road trip rivers, i felt like i learned a lot from it.

On this trip, i ran my first ever boof, which was a big deal for me, as it made me much more confident. After about a fifty minute portage to the put-in we came to the first rapid, which was a boof. We got out to scout, and i stayed to watch the first runs down. When i finally got into my boat above the boot, I was incredibly nervous, almost to the point of walking it. I told myself that i had to run it because I had to start somewhere, and that this was the perfect place to do so. After I had a very nerve-racking float towards the boot, anticipating what could go wrong, I came to the edge of the pour-over. I took my boof stroke, and went over. I landed pretty well (I think) and furiously paddled just in case i hadn't. I could have ended there, and said that I had done the boof, but my confidence was soaring by that point, so I went back up to run it again. Once more, I went over it just fine, and felt a lot better than before my first run. The rest of the river had some more boofs and drops, which I was excited, instead of nervous to run.

Running my first ever boof

When we got to the last rapid, we didn't scout because there wasn't really a great place to get out. This meant that i was about to run two drops blind. There was a bend in the river before the first drop, (which i think was about 10 feet) so i couldn't see it until i was about to go over it. The previous drops on the river had prepared me, so by this point i knew what to do. I took a boot stroke as i was going over the drop, and was able to land it with ease. What I didn't know was that there was another smaller drop a few feet below, but once again, I ran it just fine. By the end of the river i was feeling super confident about things that I would have been super nervous about before the trip. While it wasn't as intense as running something like the seven sisters on the Rouge, I felt like I still got a lot out of the Upper Petawawa, and also enjoyed it a lot.