RIVER RATS, MEET GARBURATOR
Top kayakers challenge Ottawa River
Quinton Kennedy looks and talks the part of a certified river rat.
If the 18-year-old Beachburg native wasn’t born to ride the river, he was certainly raised that way. The son of two Ottawa River raft guides whose love story began at Wilderness Tours, he was running the rapids before he even made it to high school.
Five years into freestyle kayaking, Kennedy made his official entry into the international circuit at the 2015 freestyle kayak world championships, right at home on the Ottawa River near Beachburg.
It’s the result of years spent chopping the waters nearly every day from March through to September, after school or after work, chasing a feeling that likely only his peers — and, presumably, a surfer — would fully understand: “It’s just pure freedom, really,” he says.
The event entered the short strokes Friday with quarterfinals and semifinals in the canoe and kayak categories. The competition concludes Saturday with finals in all events. If you can’t get to the site, watch the competition at worldfreestylekayakchampionships.com.
After Friday’s competition, American Dane Jackson led the way into the C1 final with Canadian Zachery Zwanenberg close behind. Two other Canadians finished out of the running. Vincent Dupont was seventh and Chris McDermott was eighth.
Top Canadian woman in the K1 women’s event was Katie Kowalski who just missed a spot in the final. Former world champion Nick Troutman, of Beachburg, led the way in the men’s K1. He was the only Canadian to make it. The leading paddler in the world, Dane Jackson, will also race Saturday. Three other Canadians finished out of the final. Devon Scott was seventh, Joel Kowalski, also of Beachburg, eighth, and Kalob Grady ninth. Ugandan paddler Sam Ward finished in sixth.
River bums in the Ottawa Valley have been lucky — spoiled, even — to be within a stone’s skip from some of the planet’s most revered rapids, including the centre of it all, the main attraction, the one and only Garburator.
The Garburator: a seven-foot standing wave on the Ottawa River that looks like it could swallow a workhorse whole in a split-second, let alone a teenager in a tiny boat.
The test that all contestants had to face during the weeklong event in the dying days of summer wasn’t one for the ill-experienced, nor for the faint-hearted.
Others aren’t so blessed with a reliably challenging wave like a Garburator — not even a Food Processor or a measly Dustbuster. These are the men and women who travel across countries, across continents and across oceans chasing their next wave.
Take for example Eoin Keyes from Limerick, Ireland. The 23-year-old says he and his mates literally have to look for waves to ride — wherever it last rained, that’s where they go. If it hasn’t rained, well, time to find something else to do and try again later.
“For a lot of us,” he said, “it’s very hard to train well enough to compete.”
It’s taken him across Ireland and beyond.
To train for international competitions, many competitors, even the casual kayakers, use their vacations to visit better destinations.
Hugo Anthony, a 16-year-old from London, England, has already been on several kayaking trips that have taken him and a friend around Europe, to Uganda and now to Canada for the second time, in addition to his trusty Hurley Lock on the River Thames.
The freestyle kayak championships — which has attracted 211 paddlers from 29 countries — aren’t like every other athletic event. More than the wave-riding, they’re a social event that has as much in common with a group retreat as an international sporting competition.
Athletes swim together in the river, eat picnic lunches in the forest, clink glasses and share stories at dinner back at the chalet restaurant after another long day.
They exist in the space between the dozens upon dozens of stubby, colourful little boats, left in idle, unattended, strapped to the tops and sides of SUVs and motor homes or leaning casually against the evergreens in the criss-crossing forest paths along the banks of the Ottawa River.
Many of them have spent weeks together at Wilderness Tours, and know each other from previous competitions. They’re sea creatures and they ’re social butterflies.
“The competition was fun, but it was the community that I got hooked on,” said Louise Urwin, 35, from Okere Falls, New Zealand. “It draws people together with similar personalities.”
The athletes are at one moment laid back, and the next, fiercely focused. Those alternate personalities seem to make the sport, and the culture that surrounds the sport, what they are.
While there are some who make a living as top contenders in freestyle kayaking — reigning champion Dane Jackson from Rock Island, Tenn., and the Ottawa Valley’s Joel Kowalski and Nick Troutman, both ranked top 10 internationally — most are try-your-besters who horde away savings to pay for a vacation with a tangential competitive side.
“The sport isn’t too serious,” said Anthony, the English teenager.
“It’s not got loads of money pumped into it, so you see these people from around the world bringing a rubbish boat they just want to paddle. It’s the love of the sport.”
In freestyle kayaking — known on the non-competitive front as playboating — paddlers do difficult tricks in a short routine to earn as many points as possible from a panel of judges.
They paddle into the crest of the rushing water, let it carry them into the trick area — a vortex where the downhill current meets the backsplash of the waves, defying, in a way, the average person’s understanding of physics — and then they let loose with flips and spins.
At best, the routine lasts 45 seconds. At worst, the kayaker catches an edge and it’s all over.
“You have to be super relaxed and super chill,” said Kennedy. “If you get out there and you’re super uptight about it, you’re going to mess up.”
The frustration on a competitor’s face when that happens can’t be hidden. They howl silently toward the sky, or grimace solemnly as they accept that this round, the wave has won.
Ugandan paddler Sadat Kawawa showed special resilience on his wave, coming from the brink of being flushed out and earning the excited applause of spectators — a fitting metaphor for his team’s struggle to even make it to Canada for the competition.
After Canadian immigration officials twice refused the team’s visa applications — over concerns they wouldn’t return home, according to documents obtained by the Citizen — their third attempt finally cleared them to compete in the competition, with help from donors who helped fund the team’s increased costs and moral support from those who wanted their visas approved.
“I think support from people all over the world made us succeed to get the visa,” teammate David Egesa told the Citizen on Wednesday.
Egesa said the help continued when they arrived in Canada, with organizers, and fellow athletes as well, providing equipment and other accommodations to a team that had been whisked away from home with only two hours’ notice that their trip would go ahead after all.
Competitors in the freestyle kayaking circuit are, without a doubt, more friend than foe. Still, when it comes time to take on the wave, in the end, every paddler goes it alone.
“There’s no one else out there,” said Kennedy. “It’s all you.”