A beatdown (and rescue) of epic proportions....(the story is well worth the read)

[eyepaddle]

Alternate title: Why eyepaddle will never paddle class V.

"As I pulled over the lip with the utterly necessary but conspicuously absent boof stroke NOT planted, I thought: "Man this could really suck!" What I didn't realize was that I had ridden up on the deceptive curler on the face of the falls, and there was nothing but air under my paddle. I put a right stroke in anyway and pulled, but that only succeeded in changing my boat angle for the worse."





"I landed slightly over-rotated with my torso fully extended, full-on 1980's Burning-man style. I took a huge hit and everything went black. My paddle was nearly ripped from my hands, I barely managed to hold onto it with my right hand as the huge, violent boils started pounding me.
I regained my paddle and briefly thought my skirt had blown, but it hadn't. I set for a roll and felt my head bounce off a few rocks, "Sweet, I'm against a wall, although hopefully not the river-right wall." I reached out and grabbed the rocks, rolled off of them only to find out that Spirit was IN MY FACE. I was behind the falls.. the absolute worst-case scenario.

I back-paddled like mad to distance myself from the falls as I can only imagine what paddling straight into the awe-inspiring destructive power of this falls would do to a person..

Getting run over by a truck comes to mind."...



Here's the rest of the story--I think I have a new hero.

http://oregonkayaking.net/tales/one_stroke/one_stroke.html

[eyepaddle]

1. I'm just gonna self kick this thing

;)

[puerco-bellies]

2. Dude

Me and Ali rock garden off the California coast, and channel islands. We are going to paddle some category 3 runs hopefully next summer. This kind of stuff ain't happening. Cool link though.

[eyepaddle]

3. Yeah, I've had one REALLY bad "man, this could really suck" moment

where I had to swim like hell to avoid getting pulled behind the waterfall--once I got out from under the curtain I got pulled in to an undercut, but I barely managed to hold on to the rocs until some friends got there to help me out.

I can't imagine facing such brutal rapids back to back like that.

And Jesse Coombs, well, what he did was just superhuman.

[puerco-bellies]

4. So far we have avoided those.

Our worst pounding was a failed surf launch just south of Santa Cruz. Central Cali surf is way heavier then what we were used to in So. Cal. Nothing like a water filled 17' tandem repeatedly mowing over and through you as you struggle to claw your way out of the surf.

We almost paddled through a large (20 yards wide x 100 yards long) chute with a rock garden in the middle at Point Lobos Monterey. We sat there and watched the surge pass through for around 20 minutes. Just as we decided that we had the swell timed to paddle the 100 or so yard length, a huge swell rolled through breaking just forward of our planned seaward exit point and sending a 6-8 foot high wall of white wash through the entire length of the chute and continued another 50 yards, ending only after smashing into a jagged rock cliff. Had we started paddling through, the wave would have been virtually unsurvivable in a tandem touring kayak. Alison is no longer gung-ho on charging in to iffy places.

This is a picture of the "chute". The conical dark rock surrounded by white wash is the mouth of the shoot. The wave was perfectly lined up, rolling from upper right to lower left ending on the back side of the cliff shown in the lower left corner of the picture.