The weekend of the 4/5th June a group of 16 paddlers from CUCC made the journey up to North Wales for a weekend of thrills and spills on the Tryweryn. This weekend was a little bit different to most since Dan and I had our Moderate Water Endorsement assessment, the final step in becoming a qualified whitewater coach. This meant that we spent the Saturday morning and a bit of the afternoon coaching Kai, Lucie, Bouyan and Adam (who kindly offered their time!) and trying to help them improve their whitewater skills. I’m pleased to say that we both passed!
Everybody else spent the morning on the Lower Tryweryn exploring what this different section of the river had to offer. Many of the paddlers on the trip had never been to North Wales with the club so this first day was all new to them. In the afternoon we all joined back together to do a few laps of the Upper river, everybody on the trip managed to do at least a short section of the Upper and we took full advantage of the free shuttle bus!
On Sunday the majority of the group headed down to the Lower river again, we spent a bit more time working on skills such as S-turns, ferrygliding and surfing, and I have to say I was really impressed by some of our paddlers first few surfs. Sunday afternoon saw us back on the Upper to try and apply some of the skills practised in the morning on a slightly more challenging section of water. Although we had quite a few capsizes on Sunday afternoon, everybody was still managing to nail their lines and make eddies that they wouldn’t have thought possible the day before. It was a pleasure to see the progress made by all our paddlers and I look forward to seeing everybody on the next whitewater trip!
Special thanks go out to Anthony, who organised everything so well as always. Thanks to Kai, Lucie, Bouyan and Adam for being perfect students (and of course Dave for passing us on our assessment) and to all the drivers without whom the trip couldn’t run!
Shahid Wahab