Westfield Wildwater River Race weekend

Alright so this weekend was the big Westfield river race weekend, a great yearly tradition for the whole Wheeler family as you can tell from Travis’s earlier post. We arrived late Friday night to Goshen where we would be staying the weekend at the Wheelers house. Saturday was an early busy day for everyone, we decided to make an early practice run of the expert course with Jay and Neil because Neil would be heading down the Novice course with a newbie and he wanted to make sure he was at the start of the novice course in plenty of time to get ready for that race. The river was a little low on Saturday but we had a fairly clean run and didn’t have anything major go on so we felt as if we were ready for the pro race on Sunday. After our quick jaunt down the expert section we jumped into the car and quickly changed into something warmer and drier so we could catch Neil and Megan’s race down the novice course. After watching Neil and Megan finish the race unscathed we quickly headed back up to Hill and Dale to catch the show.  The weather was a little rough on Saturday to say the least, cold, damp and about 40 degrees most of the day. We saw some sites this year in Hill and Dale rapids, this is a class III rapid so many of the novice paddlers have a tough time handling this section of the river. I have pieced together a little video I took from the novice race with some great examples of how to go thru this rapid and some even better examples of how NOT to go thru this rapid. We even saw a few kayakers go in this year which is a rare occasion. (The video I made seems to be to large to upload directly so you will have to click the link below and watch it on youtube)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjBjZbnMWMs

Jay, Travis, Terese and Neil before our practice run on Saturday

After getting in our full share of laughs at Hill and Dale we headed up to Travis’s Grandparents house on the rivers’ edge to start the big annual party and rest till tomorrow when we would be racing.

Overnight we had a pretty good storm roll thru the area and dump about 2” of rain so we knew that the course would be interesting the next day after hearing it pour all night. Sure enough as we made our way down from the hills of Goshen we saw all the little tributaries just gushing water out of the woods, the whole area is pretty ledgey so when it rains hard it basically just pours out of the hills right into the river. This rain overnight wouldn’t change the expert section of the race since we start out behind a large dam, this allowed the Army Corp of Engineers to basically control the height of the river and keep it right at race level as it is every year. We tackled this section pretty cleanly and didn’t have any major problems aside from a few little waves which should have been avoided but all in all the top section was really similar to other years.  The novice section of the course was a different story however, there isn’t any dam that controls the west branch of the river so when we got down to the railroad tracks where the two branches of the river meet there was a serious amount of water ripping down. Now don’t get me wrong, I love big white water, it just makes for an interesting run when you are going for time not fun. The river really changes when it is up and this year was a great example of that, there was a lot of waves where it is usually flat and the corners were pushier then usual but we talked it out a lot and worked our way thru the course. We did make one pretty large mental mistake which cost us a little bit of time, right at the top of Hill and Dale rapids Travis asked what the plan was, there is a bypass around this section that you can take and avoid the rapid all together. In a quick moment we decided we would head straight thru the middle of the rapid as we had done the past two years. I was thinking that the rapid would flatten out with so much water pouring thru but for some reason it was almost the opposite of that. We got into the middle line of the rapid and were riding 4’ to 5’ curlers, half of these waves either going right in Travis’s lap or over his head. It was tons of fun surfing these big waves, at one point Travis was about 5’ below me down in the hole of a big wave, great adrenaline rush aside from the fact that we are racing not out for a pleasure cruise. After handling the rapid and waves the best we could we quickly pulled over at the bottom, dumped the gallons of water we picked up and jumped back in to get back on course for turtle bend, a good sweeping corner with a large boulder in it that lies just below. We didn’t swim at all but Hill and Dale definitely slowed us down this year, I guess we didn’t choose wisely and should have taken the bypass after all. Lesson learned for the next time the river is up that high. The rest of the course was uneventful for us aside from the occasional whirlpools and squirrely areas that seemed to just pop up under us. We also had really great portages which I am proud of, that was always a trying area of the race for me when I started it years ago, that boat is heavy and the portages are rocky in some areas. We finished out the race with a time of 1:18:16, 3^rd place in the mixed division and 8^th place overall.

Terese, Travis, Neil and Jay before the start of the Pro Race on Sunday

Emily followed us along the course and got some great video in a few spots. I have peiced it together and posted it below, the only thing we are missing in this video is Hill and Dale rapids. If I find it out there on the great big world wide web I will attach it to the blog later on cause I bet it looked awesome from the shore seeing us bob thru those waves!