ACA Level 5 White Water Coach Training/Certification on the Ocoee River

What a great weekend.  My son, David, and I traveled to Tennessee to participate in this event.  And it sure was worthwhile.

I had not paddled the full, lower Ocoee River and really wanted to.  Just upstream is where they held the Olympic Kayaking in the late 90s. What a hoot!  David and I had been invited to be guinea pigs for Level 4 coaches who were there for either a coach update or to get certified as a Level 5 coach.  This was our first foray into water with this reputation.  You see, I had many previous admonitions to be sure to avoid the nasty hole near the put-in, and the many dangerous spots further down.  I started with a great deal of anxiety.  I was fighting everything and in a survival mode from my own fear and imagination.  One's mind can be a very scary place to be.  But, after a few rapids I began to relax and really start enjoying things.

I learned a bunch.  I especially liked learning to catch waves to assist crossing the fastest water in the river.  They call this a ferry, but I always imagined a fairy was helping me.  Go figure.  We had a neat drill going down a class II rapid with our eyes shut and paddling or turning based on instructions from a partner behind us.  That was a bit intimidating.

But the worst was solo, eyes-shut ferries.  Not only would we cross without seeing, we were to go nearly straight across without letting the stong current force us downstream.  My thought was, "You've got to be kidding!"  But, they weren't.  I would start in an eddy, look at and try to memorize the eddy line I had to cross, the current and waves in the river, and the eddy on the far side.  Then I would shut my eyes and try to feel my way across the river.  I only cheated a little on the way across and was immensely satisfied with myself.  We were all amazed at how well we did.  Even now, it is a stretch for me to imagine eyes-shut and crossing from still water into fast water, through waves in the fastest part of the river, back into smoother fast water, and then crossing another eddy line and safe in quiet water again. How sweet it was.

And, mostly I enjoyed the huge wave trains I encountered near the end of the trip.  From the cockpit of my kayak the waves looked 4 or 5 times higher than they really were.  This bit of deception makes the journey much more exciting than the view from shore would provide.  The force of the river forced me downstream at a rapid pace and all the way up the face of what appeared to be a wave at least 3 times higher than I was.  With the force of the river pushing me rapidly up hill, I could still muster the energy to try to boof off the crest and launch myself up and over the wave.  I imagined I was Jonathon Livingston Seagull.  If I had succeeded I would have fallen forever to crash in the trough way below.  But, even with the help of the river, my boof was way too wimpy to pull off such a marvelous feat.  And so were each of the other boofs I tried on the crests of those subsequent massive mountains of water.  But, there is always the next trip to the wonderful Ocoee River.