We arrived at our next destination, Soca, still pouring rain, something we had been experiencing far too much of in Val Sesia.

Blaž, owner of Positive Sport in Kobarid, a local rafting centre and outdoor equipment shop, greeted us.  We were shown to our fantastic accommodation before being invited down for a beer in the local bar, which has to be said, offered some great local beers to refresh us after the long drive from Western Italy.

We woke up in the morning to be greeted by the sight of more water falling from the sky, a quick coffee to wake up with one of the local kayak and raft guides and we had our Jed’s packed and were off to the Soča river.
The river was extraordinarily high compared to the levels usually experienced at this time of year, but it still had the stunning emerald coloured waters that the soča was famous for. We paddled down less than a kilometre before surfing and playing for a while on a small wave. We continued down with some down river freestyle moves until arriving at the Siphon Gorge, and being strongly advised to portage in play boats we obliged. We got in to the van and drove to the next get in on the trip, this time we all switched to our Shiva’s.

The run certainly steepened up with some nice grade 4 boulder rapids with great waves and holes to practice our bigger volume skills, something that we had been missing in narrow creeks of Val Sesia.

The next day we had the race based at the general take-outat the camp groupd but also it was time for us to man up to words in the bar the previous night and paddle the Kozakbach waterfall on the canyoning run that we had scouted the previous day.  We got up early and drove to the waterfall walk which had a lot more water going down the small tributary than usual.  We got changed and gave the Positive Sport team a call who were all quite excited to see their local canyoning run be paddled by two crazy British paddlers.

After a careful scout, and game of extreme poo-sticks, Cookie was first to put on a helmet and run the drop. After a fairly clean run down I felt pretty confident for firing it up.  With some helpful advice from Matt, I was ready in the pool above, I sprinted hard at the lip and tucked off the ledge.  I glanced the right hand wall on my way down positioning me for a picture perfect entry and recovery from the drop.  We were both fairly stoked to have taken down a first decent, keeping our adrenaline levels high from Italy and the Devils slide just a few days earier.
We then went back to the party site and started setting up the stand with a DJ booth and bar.

The boater X was as great as had been promised with big flood lights beaming out white light emphasising the sapphire blue waters. The rounds hit off fairly quickly with all team members qualifying. After some arduous rounds with a good few crashes, the final was on.

The final was definitely the highlight with all 4 boats fighting furiously for the win. In the end Matj, a Slovenian slalom paddler taking the win. Ajda Novak, a young local top slalom paddler won the women’s boater X with Niamh Cleary from Team Pyranha taking second place.

The rain was really hitting down hard but it didn’t seem to dampen or dilute sprits in the party that had everyone under the tarpaulins hung from the high ropes course into the car-park where the Pyranha bus and bar was.

After the party clear up was completed the next morning we drove to Ljubljana where we dropped off Andy Butler who was traveling to Munich via train then onto the UK, then met up with Ijda who kindly offered us a bed for the night prior to some paddling on the Tacen slalom course.

After a quick run in the morning my self and Matt tested the Shiva’s technical capabilities on the site, they performed exceedingly well allowing us to do slalom courses I would expect to be set in slalom race conditions.
We cruised back to Kobarid that evening and prepared for a scouting mission the next day. First we walked to the Verje Slap waterfall near Bovec, which on photos looked to be a good choice, Unfortunately on closer inspection it turned out all the water needed to make the drop runnable was swallowed up by a Hydro Electric system which was fairly disappointing but it was still a very impressive sight. We also went to scout the Ucja river which also looked promising from the road, however this too was an extremely long walk up a mountain for a river that wasn’t really as steep as we were hoping, but still a beautiful walk and run if the water was a little bit higher.  Also the owners of the bar at the road there were extremely helpful and informative.  We did however buy chips and drinks J.

That Night we began to look at waterfalls in Europe online, and up popped Croatia. It looked incredible, picturesque and perfect. We found a local rafting centre near one of the falls we wanted to run so we left Kobrid immediately from our kushtie Positive Sport apartment and were there by dawn.  After scouting one section that we were told we were not allowed to paddle, we spoke with a local rafting operator who also ran kayak tours. They put us up for the night on their campsite and we went for a climb to the largest bat colony in Europe, a cave only 6 KMs away and had only ever seen my less than a handful of people, we felt very privileged indeed to be there.

The Next day we joined the rafting group on the Zrmanja River.  We took a few of the local raft guides paddling, letting them demo our modest fleet of kayaks and doing some kayak school.  This river is perfect for kayak school.  One of Cookies top 5 rivers in the World for it he said and beautiful too.  We tagged along with the Rafttek guides and did our video boating thing to help promote their trips.  On arrival to the largest drop on the river, Visoki, both Matt and I were immediately stoked, as it was super clean and deep 40+ fall, exactly what we had been looking for!
Cookie won paper, rock, scissors but let me go 1^st.  I gladly took down the Nano getting the line I wanted off the lip and plunging deep in to the bubbles at the bottom, Matt followed in his Shiva landing nicely upright at the bottom. Matt then went running back up with the Nano on his shoulder, thirsty for more.  He was in a freestyle mood and threw a huge hammer off the lip.

The run continued down with some nice class 3 rapids including the šine rapid. After we got off the river we went to the local bar, which is at the take out in Mušcovi which not only served super cold beers but also amazing burgers!

We could not believe what we had stumbled across, a gem in a most unexpected place not that far from Slovenia, the water is some of the cleanest I have ever seen.  That evening we went back to the raft centre where we took some more locals paddling on the flat section above the raft run before heading off to our next destination, Lienz, Austria.

Gopro mountain games

This weekend saw another year of the Vail mountain games taking place in Colorado, featuring some of the best and most progressive outdoor athletes in the world taking part to showcase their skills and try and take home some prize money.

First up was the Home stake creek race, A really continuous section of water with some tough moves to make and a couple of flat water sprints to fatigue you before taking on some of the bigger rapids on the race.

Demshitz flew down the creek race with some clean lines and fast sprints, we saw Dave Fussili take the second best time of the day, only bested by Olympic slalom paddler Mike Dawson.

Full list of results here :

http://www.mountaingames.com/media/163563/2013%20steepcreekfinalresults.pdf

Check out the video to the creek race here :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8-WnUYa4yM

Next up was the freestlye event, taking place on a shallow and relatively flushy hole. Unfortunately I had a bad days competing and failed to make the cut, Matt Anger and Mike Patterson threw down some awesome rides but it was unfortunately not quite enough to advance to the next round. Luckily two Demshitz made it through in the form of Craig Kleckner and Dave Fusilli, Both stormed the semi finals event and moved up in the rankings but unfortunately just missed the top 5 and failed to advance to the next round.

Rowan stuart threw down in the women’s category, despite still being a junior and took home 3rd place for team Pyranha.

Go Pro Mountain games is a truly sick event and I was stoked to take part and see the boys throw down, but I truly cannot wait to get back here next year and redeem myself.

See you on the water,

Bren

You can also read the following newspaper articles on how the event went down.

http://www.summitdaily.com/news/6825891-113/creek-steep-finals-run

Pyranha Team Tour 2013

Italy – Stage One – Val Sessia – 21 – 29^th May

We have all arrived safe in Italy after a gruelling but smooth drive down from the Pyranha factory in Runcorn.  We set out with a bunch of cash for fuel and tolls thinking we would have plenty of surplus cash on arrival.  We were very wrong.

On arrival we had extinguished almost our entire budget for the trip down.  We had not anticipated the 150 hit for the mont blanc tunnel, awch!!!!

We arrived without stopping to Val Sessia on Tuesday 21^st May 13 and strait into our first river, the Semenzina.  A run I would not usual select for a warm up run on arrival to a country.  Nothing too technical but we took a few initial hard hits for myself and David without sufficient warming up, I felt a bit silly pulling a shoulder muscle on the first run after preaching to all my students that stretching is the most important thing to do.  The rest of the run was fairly low impact, classic Italy creeking, beautiful.  In the afternoon I took David down the Egua for the first time in good flows.  I love this section.  It was the old Teva games race run many years ago for me so I was stoked to be back in higher flows than I remember.  It is a classic run for Italy providing a serious feel with minimum consequence.  When the sun is out, this is truly a photo kayaker’s dream.  Following this run, the guys shot down the Alpine sprint section to warm down, a great 1^st day returning to Campetogno for a nice shower and pizza for Tom Parkers last night in Italy before journeying back to the UK.

Whilst Tom was nursing his hangover, it was our 2^nd day in Val Sessia and we wasted no time.  We all missioned back to the Egua and found the water had dropped considerably, being a large group now, we spent a few hours on the run taking our time and getting some nice footage.  The afternoon took us to the Semenza, running a few km’s below the Egua section.  Here we met up with the German boys and had a lovely sporty run down there. It reminded me of some sections in Wales, similar to the Fairy Glen but obviously much cleaner and more pleasing to the eye.  Good fun for sure but I imagine in higher flows it could be quite interesting with not many options for portaging or scouting!  If you think you can see a line it probably is that one and it’s not as bad as it looks from upstream, good to go at low – medium flows.  Following this section, we jam -jammed back to camp for coffee, showers and our first team – cooked meal.

The days following were pretty relaxed, there was some low level boating and relaxing after a long mission, a good time to catch up on trip and keep things organised, its super easy to let things slip and then things became chaotic.

The day before the festival the Pyranha team were accosted to run a creek race clinic on the Sessia sprint section for the day.  The course went extremely well and we managed to really set out a good race clinic that we can use for the rest of the trip.  All the clients were really happy with the guiding and coaching and got much out of our support, really nice day and good start for the Pyranha coaches.

Saturday was race day, hosted by Gene 17.  There were to be three races, a team race with three boaters per team,  an individual race and the sweet rumble boat o cross in the evening.  It was a long day with lots of running about, long racing through the Sessia sprint section, around 12 minuets long.  It was brutal.  The Pyranha team came in 3^rd behind the obvious Sutton / Ramazza team and the might of the Germans.  We did ok to come in just after their time. David came 5th in the Individual which he was pretty happy with!  The top 32 from the individuals went through to the sweet rumble.  All of the team made it through.  After a few heats of the rumble, David got knocked out followed by Andy who put up a good battle with top seed Ramazza.  I battled away with Joe Morley every round until the Semis until we were both up against Sutton, I was, surprising to myself leading off the block until the last eddy where Sutton passed me like a bolt of lightning followed by Joe Morley spinning me off line to hit the finish ahead by an arms length! An awesome race, one of the main reasons I love Boat X, you never know what will happen.  Joe Morley respectively went on to place 2^nd in the final behind Ramazza who took the belt, well done Joe and Michele, Legends.

Saturday night was the festival party and David Bain’s 20^th birthday.  We all had a meal in the restaurant with a nice birthday cake to finish it off.  East from Fokiwa adventure played live for the party, well done East. The prize giving was insane, they held it at midnight, by then everyone was fairly drunk and the prize give a ways were crazy.  The party went on but chilled out towards the end.  Big thanks to Gene 17 for organising a super cool Val Sessia River Festival.

     

We wasted no time after the event; we went out and paddled every day before heading to Slovenia on Thursday.  Monday was Lowri’s last day with us before heading home so we had a full day out starting with Sessia Gorge followed by the Semenza then to finish up the day, Andy and Lowri hucked the Landvasser drop.  On Tuesday, myself and David went into the saw-mill cataract ( Devil’s slide ), first decented by Shaun Baker back in the 90’s.  We paddled just drops two and three as the first looked like a crazy mission to get to.  We both made the drops ok and had a great time in there.  I would recommend knowing what your doing if your thinking of attempting the devil’s slide, its not amazingly difficult but could have serious consequences in things went wrong.  After the falls we paddled out to meet up with the van at the confluence with Sessia.  This was a welcomed sight and the end to a really good mission.  Wednesday was to be our last day on the water in Val Sessia, we had planned to go look at the Heidi section of the Sorba as it had rained hard Tuesday night.  I had been looking into this section for many years and finally had a chance.  Sadly, on inspection with Matze for the mission it was still too low for the key drops so we passed on the mission and joined a bigger group to paddle the Gronda, Sorba slides and the Sorba down to just above the Devils slide secion.  This lower gorge after the slides was technical class 4/5 with some really nice feel good sections, recommend that you have someone who knows it to go with and you would have a much nicer time.

We returned to Campertogno for a nice BBQ with Matze and Katya, a really nice last night at camp ready to mission over to Slovenia.  Overall, the Team Van had a great time in Italy and now ready to move on.  Stay tuned for more Pyranha Team Van progress, From Campertogno, Val Sessia Valley, Cookie, Bainer and Butler out, peace