The rest of the crew arrive down
There hasn't been a blog update in two days. So here's what happened.
On Friday we did 2 training sessions. One morning and one in the late afternoon. The quality of moves being thrown down has increased substantially after the arrival of the Dutch and French teams along with no.#2 at the world championships last year, Peter Czonka. One of the French juniors who paddles a Gui-Gui Proj boat is doing particularly well and managing to get the boat out of the water for his air blunts and sometimes clean air blunts. McNasties are also now making an appearance with some sticking them although not a regular occurance. There are many people also practicing entry moves and these seem to be working quite well for a lot of people (not yet for me though!).
We've implemented our own boat storage facility which involves using bike locks (I brought 2 just in case) to secure as many of the kayaks as we can to a nearby tree as the organisers boat storage which was promised has never materialised.
When we arrived down to the spot on Saturday the levels were very low and the feature wasn't really worth getting on for. The word was that it was going to be like that all day. We decided then to go and do a bit of a shopping session for some good wholesome food, then back to the apartment to cook. Jackie had her lunch pre-prepared and was the first back down to the wave to check it. When she arrived she saw that it was now working so she gave us a quick call to let us know and hopped on for a session. By the time we arrived down the levels had dropped back down again. Seems as though they had a release for siesta or something and then stopped it. Anyway we sat around the wave waiting for it to come back up but it never did. At that point we had a fellow Irish paddler down to visit us from the nearby town of Vigo. He was more than keen to give the feature in Ourense a shot even in very low water. We then went to a nearby pool for some R&R after our kayakless day.
The rest of the team arrived down last night all appart from Leonard Kelleher who is due to arrive in this evening at some point with a few of the French team members who gave him a lift down from Toulouse where he is currently studying.
The lads at the pool + mystery guest trying to avoid being in the shot
Today there is no water on the feature so its going to be a rest day.
