The blog re-awakens for the next chapter of the adventures of the Irish freestyle team
As of tomorrow the majority of Irish freestyle kayaking team will have made its way to the site of this years' European freesyle kayaking championships which take place in Ourense in North Western Spain. Myself and a number of the junior team members will fly out on flight EI742 from Dublin to Santiago de Compostela airport whereupon we will procure our rented transporation and proceed to the aformentioned Ourense. Feel free to come along to the airport in droves to wish us well on our conquest. This year the team are staying in Ourense Universitario on-campus accomodation in the lead up to and during the competition.
I will again endeavour to keep the paddling public back on the Emerald Isle up to date as to the adventures of the Irish freestyle kayaking team.
The competition starts on Monday the 21st of July so we have between now and then to get our act together with practice runs on the feature. I was informed just today from a reliable source on the ground in Ourense that at mid-day there was a bulldozer in the river moving boulders changing the configuration so that eddy service will be available for the competition. Apparently organisers are working off a photo of what the feature looked like a few years ago and this is what they are going for. This also means that paddlers who had hoped to get in extra practice on the specific Europeans feature by going out early were disappointed as the feature that will be left once the bulldozer has finished will more than likely be quite different to what it was before the modification. Various other team captains have been crying out for solid information about the competition and the feature which has up until now not been forthcoming, other than the basic competition website. There was talk of a more substantial competition website but this has not yet materialised.
Thats it for the first blog entry of this competition. Keep an eye out for (hopefully) daily updates of what we get up to. I suspect it will amount mostly to kayaking and its associated banter but you never know!
