What You Should Know About Whitewater Kayaking
December 4th, 2008

To say that whitewater kayaking is a sport where you paddle a kayak up or down stream in a river would be a dramatic oversimplification. Kayaking, especially in whitewater situations, is challenging and can be dangerous.

The kayak itself is a long, thin shaped boat with a rounded or V-shaped hull. It has a center seat for the pilot and a waterproof skirt that fastens around the pilot's waist to stop the water from entering the boat. Kayaks can be as short as 6-feet long or as long as more than twice that length. They are usually constructed of a rugged plastic, which reduces the damage done by sharp rocks in the river's rapids.

The paddle for a kayak is as unique as the kayak itself. It's a double bladed paddle that, by nature of its design, dictates that you paddle on one side of the kayak and then on the other side -- back and forth -- unlike a rowboat where you paddle with two oars simultaneously.

There are four basic kinds of whitewater kayaking: playboating, slalom, riverrunning and creeking.

Playboating is a sport unto itself. It involves putting a kayak through a series of 'gymnastic-like' moves with colorful names like cartwheeling, looping, surfing and spinning. An experienced playboater can practically stand a kayak on its nose because the kayaks used for playboating are designed to allow the bow and stern to be easily submerged. This facilitates all the trick moves required in playboating. The sport of playboating has its own competition built around it that is, appropriately enough, called the "whitewater rodeo."

Slalom kayaking is precision kayak racing. The racecourse for the slalom event is normally some designated section of a river that has been set up with a series of gates that must be navigated in a particular order. The gates are color-coded (red and green) poles that are suspended vertically over the water. The red poles serve as the gates for the race in one direction and the green poles are the gates that must be navigated while going in the opposite direction. The winner of the slalom race will get from point A, through the correct gates, to point B and back again, through the other gates, to Point A before anyone else. The kayaks used for slalom racing must be a certain size and will be made out of fiberglass and carbon fibers which makes them sleeker and faster than other kayaks. Slalom kayaking, in case you don't remember where you heard that name before, is an event in the International Summer Olympic Games.

Riverrunning is a bit schizophrenic. It takes the kayak from a leisurely row down one section of a river to a portion of the river that is a frenetic obstacle course through fast rapids and even over waterfalls. Not for the faint of heart, riverrunning puts the kayak and its pilot through almost every possible adrenaline-pumping maneuver. This category of whitewater kayaking includes day-trips, multi-day trips with overnight camping on shore and river races known as whitewater races.

Creeking is also known as extreme kayaking and if riverrunning is a bit schizophrenic, creeking can only be called a bit psycho! Extreme kayakers go looking for the wildest, most dangerous stretches of the unfriendliest rivers and then challenge them.

The extreme kayaker's world of pure adrenaline consists of billions of gallons of water powering its way through narrow canyons, pouring down granite-lined chutes and cascading over multiple waterfalls, some as high as 80 feet. However violent and dangerous this sounds to the person who is not addicted to the extreme, this scene of wet mayhem is only an interlude in their search for the next Class VI rapid and the next 80-foot waterfall.

Also called "steepcreeking" and "hairboating," the sport was born in the mid-1980s, when a small group of kayakers began looking for something more than overcrowded rivers with weekend warriors out in their kayaks and canoes. This group began a concerted effort to find the places where the others would not dare go and they went. Places like Triple Falls on the Little River in North Carolina. Triple falls takes the dauntless kayaker over three waterfalls that total a 125-foot descent. The unwritten rule for "steepcreeking" is: a one-mile stretch of the river must drop at least 250 feet to be a suitable venue

---

Please use the form below to comment on this page:

Name:
Email Address:	(kept private)
Comments:
Let me know if my message is replied to:	yes
Please enter the digits 513 in the box. This keeps away spam robots:

PHP Warning: Unknown(): Unable to load dynamic library 'C:\Program Files\HSphere\3rdparty\PHP\PHP5\ext\php_curl.dll' - The specified module could not be found. in Unknown on line 0 PHP Warning: Unknown(): Unable to load dynamic library 'C:\Program Files\HSphere\3rdparty\PHP\PHP5\ext\php_gd2.dll' - The specified module could not be found. in Unknown on line 0 PHP Warning: Unknown(): Unable to load dynamic library 'C:\Program Files\HSphere\3rdparty\PHP\PHP5\ext\php_mysql.dll' - The specified module could not be found. in Unknown on line 0