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We support
Check out the Blue Mountains Climbing festival this weekend April 7-8. Live music, films, speakers, climbing competitions and Monique will have a stall with Entropy Gear products. An awesome weekend, get out there. Check it out at http://www.climbingfestival.com.au
www.entropygear.com/teamadrian.htm
For one week only we are offering a brand new Jackson Kayak Fun Granite 05 outfitting (ratchet backband system) with happy feet $1200. Contact us for further details. First in gets it, offer will finish this Sunday 1st April 2007.
Steve goes skiing at Szklarska Poreba.
A free hammock is hiden somewhere in Sydney if you can find it....... Suburb: kliomprypac Clue: Somewhere that held sporting fun, Is a hammock for lying in the sun, Next to a bridge that holds up the trains, Get it and we will give you website fame
Well, the waves, weather, water, people, scenery, and everything else are amazing. EJ and I are training pretty hard, and it is starting to show. We have been getting some sweet air, and cool moves like clean blunt and clean backstabs, panams front and back, airscrews right and left, helixes right and left, McNasty's, and a couple combo moves thrown in there. We are living at the Hairy Lemon, which is a little island five minutes from Nile special. It is pretty cool, but there isn't a whole lot to do, so we play a lot of football and ultimate Frisbee. Yesterday I cut my foot open pretty good playing football, so hopefully it won't get infected. I have some sweet shots to show you, though I might not be able to post them, only because the internet is so slow. The Hamock is working awesome, though we just realized that we put it up in this tree that has these hairy caterpillars in it, that give you horrible rashes, so we are going to have to move it. The shades are do good. I'll keep you posted, live from Uganda, Nick
On the 24th of February, Frazer, Ben, dad and l went and paddled the Wingecarribee. It was at medium level, 1 metre. We all stopped off at the Bakery, dad and Frazer couldn't decide whether to have Mc Donald's or the Bakery for breakfast but they decided, so we went to the Bakery. When we got on the river, Frazer and dad told me and Ben that the entry rapid would sort the boys from the man. My favourite rapid had to be the Water Fall it was about 2 metres in height. It my first ever drop l had run. We found this pour-over that you could stick your boat nose in and it would loop you. No one had a swim that day.
Thanks to Darin McQuoid for his pictures of Nick in Mexico. Awesome pictures that's for sure.
Thanks to Adrian and Colin for their help and Ben for the Jackson Rocker
So a couple of days before the start of competition for the Australian Rafting Nationals I received a call that there was a spot available on the team that won the last competition. I made a few quick bookings and off to Tasmania I went. Such an amazing place, with huge mountains and immense forests.
We got straight on the water, early on the first the morning and briefly got our head around our positions and strokes. Then with a few strokes warm up we were off for our first time trial. With hardly any practice prior and no rafting competition experience, I was feeling a little daunted at it all. Our time trial was fast and we got off to a great start. We got down the bottom feeling happy with our performance, then it was straight on to slalom. Our first run down touched a few gates however we were happy with our time. Our second run down saw us slightly miss an eddy and we paddled extremely hard to try to get back up stream, all to no avail as we found ourselves slipping backwards down a rapid and missing a gate all together. Obviously not a great result but we were still fastest overall.
As this was taking place, the Teva Cataract Extreme race was also being conducted which is probably Australia's largest Kayaking Event, a race down some spectacular grade 4 rapids with some interesting sections. The first day saw a few paddlers swim, a few paddles smacked some faces, but one paddler managed to land so hard that the bolts in his C1 seat were pushed through his knees meaning a quick trip to the hospital. I guess it's not a real kayak event without some sort of carnage.
That night saw a few presentations and a party in the middle of the mountains. Thanks to red bull most of the competitors at the event were up most of the night although no one knows exactly why.....The following morning started off with the down river race. Now this is where things got a little interesting. None of our team had run the Cataract River. We got a quick heads up on some of the lines and we were off. Most of the team were not excited about the prospect this, however this is the kind of thing that really gets me going. I love the unknown, I guess I am a true adrenaline junkie, and the thought of running racing down a grade 4 river blind fired me up.
Our run down the river was by no means clean and the raft got held up on a few rocks. One drop saw us pounding a rock fairly hard which ejected Stuart, our front right paddler, out of the front of the raft. He really got some huge air and luckily was ok. A few rapids on and I took a tumble myself. The boat got pined between two rocks and stuck there for a couple of minutes before the rest of the team could force it out. To my dismay the boat floated on past me which meant I had to swim the next rapid to catch up. Just before I swam on, Mullet, a mate who was in a C1 close by said….. “just keep your feet up on this one”. I pushed off and then remember being under for what seemed like a very long time. Apparently at the bottom of the rapid Mullet saw my paddle come out of the water first vertically which I was holding upright, so yes, I was way down. A quick scramble up the raft and we were over the line. A slow result but we got through it safe.
With just one win, it all came down to the head to head race in front of some 3000 spectators. At the start we took off fast and grabbed an early lead. Around a few rapids we extended this lead to what seemed an impassable distance. We took our usual river right line and looked like it was all over, unfortunately this right line was by far the slower line and the Tully boys caught right up so we were side by side over the final rapid. Our team dug deep and we only just managed to stay in front winning by about half a meter. An amazing competition and a great team result, the crowd went wild. National Champions and off to the Worlds in Korea.
I also managed to take a trip down to an awesome Jackson Kayak retailer, Wetspot Watersports in Canberra. Mick and the gang down there really know their gear.
The party at Cataract
Oh man, did we have an awesome session
yesterday or what! The dam at Rock Island released and the level was
higher than i've ever seen. It was something like 8 grand. Anyway
Brave Wave was off the hook. It was way bigger and green, oh and so
smooth. I loved it, we ended up paddling for 4 and a half hours, instead
of our usual 2 hours.
Just checking in. I just got back from Canada, where we were rippin' up Buseater when no one else would go. It was another great level, and we had crazy warm weather for days. It was +14 C in January, which never happens. We paddled for 5 days straight, being the only ones out there. Anyway here are some cool pics.
Jon is a great guy. He has the ultimate positive attitude and travels the world seeking bigger playgrounds. In the past year he has fired up Canada, USA, UK Europe and Uganda paddling some of the worlds biggest waves and rapids. While on the World Cup of Freestyle Kayaking tour he became a great mate to everyone as more people cheered him on than any other competitor. Jon loves to paddle and more recently has dominated the UK with his freestyle moves. He is off again to Uganda where he will take on one of the most notoriously dangerous rivers in the world, the White Nile.
As for Monique, she is also on top of the world breaking many records. Monique travels the world seeking harder routes and her passion is 'onsight' climbing. 'Onsight' means to climb a route on your first attempt without falling and without detailed prior knowledge of the difficulties. She was the first person to onsight the legendary Totem pole in Tasmania, a 65 metre free standing dolerite column. She was the first Australian woman to onsight a grade 32 route, and is also the Australian Difficulty Climbing National Champion. Monique has recently returned home after climbing at Joshua Tree National Park USA, a rock climbers Mecca. Monique continues to dominate climbing and breaking records and is a very exciting person to keep tabs on. But enough talk, the pictures say a whole lot more.
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