A Couple of Days at the Lemon

We spent a couple of days this week down on the lower section of the river staying on an island in the middle of the river called the Hairy Lemon. It's a lovely relaxing spot just a short paddle from the Nile Special rapid which has the world reknowned Nile Special playwave as well as some less well known but equaly good features. We were doing two paddling sessions a day up there. In the morning we'd hit the club wave just after breakfast for a few hours, break for lunch and then wait in the shade while the midday heat passed and the water levels came up to make Nile Special work.

Getting onto the Special is something of a black art in itself, unless the water levels are quite high you have to be towed onto the wave using a rope and getting the knack of towing on while paddling with one hand and staying upright on such a big bouncy wave is quite tricky. That said once you're on there it's worth the effort. The wave is incredibly fast, and equally big. The end result being a lot of airtime as your boat planes and starts to bounce, a LOT. It was a really good couple of days for me up there and while I fell off the rope and had to battle the wave train more times than I can count, I managed to pull off a few blunts on Special and land a loop on the Club wave. It just goes to show, with the right feature, even I can manage some of these moves.

We're back at the NRE again now, it's a better place to pick up a gang to go running the river with instead of just hitting up the play spots. I ran the Brickyard rapid with a French guy called Ollie the evening before we left for the Lemon. It's a great little run, but difficult to get a look at without getting very close. So having run one of the back channels the plan for the next couple of days is to get a few more done as well as trying to run Silverback clean before we leave (I was counted at 6 rolls on my last run down it). This afternoon's project is to run Kalagala, which is a very visually impressive drop with a really nasty hole on one side. But the line itself is wide and clean so technically it's not very demanding, there's only one move to make, you just have to make it.