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High Water

This is a copy of a blogpost I wrote for the Team Pyranha Blog

High water!

As we transition from summer flows into the winter storm season our river options (here in the UK at least) widen. There have been a few posts on social media, both of boats and kit lost on high water runs, as well as questions from folk looking for alternatives to their usual runs, as they reach high flows.

This is NOT a ‘do not go floodwater boating’ public safety announcement, rather some ideas for paddlers looking to have safe days out on the water, based extensively on my failings when I was younger. If you see me on the river feel free to ask about the time 8 of us got on a river, and after 500m there were 6 swimmers… we were still collecting boats from the estuary as darkness fell!

Some terminology first…

High

The river is above its normal paddledable level.

Bank full

The river has filled its normal channel, and there is no gap between the water and the bankside.

Flood

The river out of its banks and flowing through the trees on the edges of the river.

All of these levels provide excellent sport for us as kayakers, provided the team and environment that we choose to go into are in balance. Here’s some tips for ensuring this balance…

Paddler Jonny Hawkins, Photographer Rory Wood, River Alaknandar, India

1. Check the forecast

Check the weather forecast (sounds obvious right!) and know what has happened the few days before in the local area.

If the river is already high when you go to get on, and there is more rain in the forecast, we can assume that the river will continue to rise. This is due to the headwaters (catchment) being already saturated, and so any rise becomes exponential – water has nowhere to soak into, and so runs straight into the river.

Flow graph from the Lledr, North Wales. See how fast the river rises as a result of previous days wet periods saturating the ground.

2. Head up the valley

So, we’ve got to our planned river, and it is running high. We are not lemmings – we can make rational decisions! One option is to head further up the valley, lessening the impact of the rain on our drainages. A classic example of this is the River Findhorn in Scotland – the lower gorge goes most of the time, but the upper section of river only becomes paddleable in high water.

Paddler Ian Salvat, Photo Jan Larrue, Tobalina, Spain.

3. Turn the grade down

As the rivers are so much more forceful, and things happen much faster on high rivers, then lessening the grade we are paddling increases our margins for safety. I have had some of my favourite days paddling down big wave trains on grade 2 rivers, surfing waves that don’t normally form (and dodging trees as they float down!). A great example of this is the Dee, in North Wales. Last weekend it was huge, but the section below the normal ‘classic’ run would have been incredible fun.

4. Change drainages

In the UK we are often blessed with being close to a multitude of runs, with rivers in one valley being off the scale, yet two valleys over there being a normal flow (or no water!) in the rivers. I’ve been on a very high Mawddach, and yet when we’ve passed the Eden confluence there has been little more than a trickle coming down!

5. Drink coffee

Our gut instinct is a very powerful thing. If we’ve spent a couple of hours trying everything above, and still haven’t found anything we feel like we want to paddle then go and drink coffee. It rains a lot in the UK, so the rivers will be up again soon…

If you want to read more about the background to these ideas of good decision making then my good friend Tom Parker has written this about Heuristics for paddlers here: Link to Heuristics for paddlers article

Paddler Daniel Wilkinson, Photo Luke Kemp, Callander playpark, Scotland

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