Reading River Features for Whitewater Canoeing: Part 1

Video Transcript

"So a river is just like any other environment, it has different features, and if you learn to read those features well, you can maneuver on the river and you can understand what the river is doing in different places and that will help your boating a lot. Some of the real basic features are rocks, and, lots of rocks in the river. Rocks can be really helpful features in the river because they form eddies, behind each rock, downstream from each rock is a calm area, this area that I’m standing in is an eddy, in this eddy, the water’s actually moving upstream a little bit, toward me a little bit and the downstream currents moving by us. The shear zone, where the two currents meet, the eddy water here and the downstream moving current over here is called the eddy line, and this eddy line is pretty well defined, you can see a series of whirlpools and kinda boiling water, the eddy line is going to be a place of unstability, instability, for your boat. You don’t want to spend a lot of time in an eddy line, but it’s a good indicator of where you want to be or where you don’t want to be and where you want to place your paddle in an eddy turn or a peel out. So an eddy line is a real important and a very visible feature on a rapid. Another feature that you often see on a rapid are waves and this wave train is a pretty consistent wave train, uh, consists of five or six different waves, all formed by the water running over a small drop upstream. When you have a wave train like that, you can read the wave train and see how regular it is. A nice regular wave train is going to indicate that there is either a narrowing of the river or that there is just one drop upstream that’s forming it. If there’s an irregularity in the wave train that may show that there is debris in the river of something in the way of the wave train itself that’s changing the pattern and that could be a bad sign or something you want to watch out for. "