The Last Thursday By: West Burge

           We did a multitude of things that scared or challenged me on the this Thursday. The day started just as a normal Thursday should start, with a good hardy breakfast. I continued my trend of experimenting with different pancake and waffle types. For breakfast we had chocolate strawberry waffles and fried eggs. I cooked for most of the morning and then squeezed in a little bit of time to eat and clean at the end. All the Keeners met in the thunder dome to have a morning meeting before we kayaked. We talked about how to stay stoked for the last few days of paddling. Stevo put it this way, "When you go home you will spend all of your time thinking about the Ottawa River. You will miss it, you will wish to be playing happily in it. Then you will think about how you wasted the last three days of Keeners sitting on the side of the river watching other people doing fun things. Then you will wish you had done the fun things that the other Keeners had done". On that note we headed up to Phill's hole to start off thursday. There were some pretty epic beatdowns. After that we headed down to lunch and then to Braindoosh. Once we had played there for a little while, we headed down stream to Coliseum for a quick swim. I was really scared of this at first, but eventually I got over my fear and sent it. This was probably one of the coolest things that I have done in my life. It was pretty awesome. My point of this article is to make the most out of the days you have at Keeners. Somebody had to work really hard to send you there, and you better make the most of that $999 dollars a week.

Stern Stall -Zac Cole

coming to keener on my first day was very intimidating kids where doing stern stall and bow stalls and the odd flat water loop and I was off trying to double pump.  I worked very hard trying to perfect my stern stall. I was always practicing on flat water and when coaches said I couldn't do it because it made me slow I would paddle harder and then practice after being ahead of the group.  However come the end of Thursday and Friday I had bad leg pains and found rolling hard and decided to not to try anymore. After doing two small sessions on baby face Friday, Saturday and Sunday I was coming back a couple of minutes early on Sunday with  Ryan and Riley two of the best kayakers trying to do there flat water loops.  I decided my leg was a lot better and fit to try and I finally hit my stern stall.  Somehow I made one when Anna told me to pose over a 3 minute period I wasn't even in the bow up position for a second and luckily she got it.  This starts hopefully the first of many tricks I can do on flat water