​A summer of warm water, sandy beaches and perfect waves sounds like most people’s ideal, well this is what you can find if you head to the Ottawa Valley for the season!  The past few months I’ve been working as a kayak instructor/raft-guide/summer camp carer/shuttle driver/dining room worker/whatever else they want me to do so I can afford to spend a few months living in a beautiful little cabin in the most idyllic spot on this classic river.

The Ottawa is famed for its world-class freestyle waves and the best come in at high levels due to spring meltwater.  Unfortunately, I arrived a little late from Peru to catch the really high water but was in perfect time for 3 weeks of the famous Mini-Bus wave.  I went almost every day to this wave whilst it was in, often for 5 hours in a day (I didn’t have much else to do at the time).  I managed to try some new tricks I’d never done before such as flashbacks and a few attempts at airscrews, which didn’t go terribly, as well as working on perfecting older tricks and just working on timing and control on a big wave.  Huge thanks to Lou and Graham for putting up with me in a spare trailer for these weeks, and giving me the best possible start to the summer.

Signing up to two long (18 and 30 days) trips down the Marañon River in Northern Peru was quite a commitment to the unknown.  Unfamiliar with the river, the groups, and really anything to do with long rafting expeditions it was going to be a big adventure and learning experience.  Sierra Rios runs regular trips down this beautiful river and can accommodate all levels of paddlers/rafters on trips ranging from a week to 30 days.  Check out the website at www.sierrarios.org for more information.

The Marañon River is considered the hydrological source of the Amazon being the river that adds the most volume to the Amazon River.  Over the two trips we paddled over 500km of this river passing through stunning canyons, long flat stretches and some excellent big-volume rapids. We chose to take playboats as we had the rafts to carry all our gear and it gave us the opportunity to catch and play on some of the excellent surf waves on the way down the river.

So you’ve seen all the videos, read the blog posts but are still wondering just what it was like to be an athlete at the Whitewater Grand Prix in Canada this spring.  Well to sum it up in 5 adjectives it was: amazing, exhilarating, terrifying, exhausting and surprising.  To find out more…read on; here is my account as a competitor relatively new to the whole brown-clawing, flat cap wearing, stout, church scene of rather good whitewater kayakers.