Race day at keeners - Tim

Race day is one of my favourite days at Keeners. On race day we do lots of different races on all the rapids on the river.

The first race we did was a relay race down Mcoys rapid. My team didn't do very well but it was still lots of fun. Race day is a very good thing to improve your kayaking skills, it challenges you to paddle lines that you wouldnt usually go on, and it teaches you to read the water and find the fastest lines.
Ous second race was on garberator, it was just a mass start, the first to the bottom wins. But there was a catch, we had to go down this rapid with our skirts off and our legs out. I found this very challenging, and I fell out of my boat on the first little wave, and swam the rest of the rapid. This was my favourite race.
After lunch we had another race on Garb, this one was to practice our backward paddling and backwards ferrying, which is much harder than what it looks! I did quite well in this race, with a time of 56 seconds and that got me 3rd=. Backwards paddling is an important things to practice because it makes our shoulders stronger and less prone to dislocation - which is a kayaking injury that is way to common.
When we were not racing, we had time to surf Garberator and pushbutton, which are 2 amazing waves that you can do a heap of tricks in. I worked on blunts in garberator, and i learned how to do a flatwater helix.