A quick report by Snakey from Symonds Yat, the first division 2/3 race for some of our Paddle Peaksters.
Symonds Yat rapids are on a large bend of the river Wye near Monmouth on the Welsh / English border. It’s a spectacular and very well visited area which also has a great set of rapids for canoe slalom. The rapids are fairly wide and fast, but there’s no big significant features at normal flows, so the main focus is on good ferry glides and planning ahead!
A few of our more experienced racers took the opportunity to make this their first race of the season. With a cold but bright forecast, they assembled early Saturday to see what the course entailed. Saturdays course featured some tight crosses into sharp or boily eddy lines and a few staggers that came up faster than you expected! It’s fair to say that for many this was a course to just to focus on getting all the gates, as there wasn’t always the opportunity to go back for a missed gate. Any run that was clean would stand a good chance of a good result. Over the whole weekend only 2 paddlers managed clean runs back to back! After some very thoughtful and taxing runs our chasers had performed well on the first day and could rest up for Sundays racing.
After waking to a good frost, the welcome sun returned and practice was underway. James, Daniel and Eadie all planned their runs well, again negotiating some fast and tight staggers, mixed in with some big crosses and cheeky upstreams. First runs were good, but there was still room to improve so after lunch they focussed on cleaning up a few sections to shave a few seconds. Eadie managed to shave 12.5 seconds off her first run and finish 13th in Div 2 K1W, James took over 5.5 seconds off his first run to finish 9th in Div 2 K1M, and Daniel took almost 5 seconds off his time to finish 24th in his first Div2 K1M race since promotion. Well done to you all on a really testing course, looking good for the season ahead.
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