Words:
Nick Boreham

Photos:
Pete Atkinson

Nick Boreham
Nick runs the River Stench blog at https://riverstench.com, with the aim of presenting paddling stories in an entertaining way for both paddlers and non-paddlers alike. As a student at the University of Nottingham, Nick picked up playing canoe polo and started focusing on creeking, playboating and coaching. During this time he also joined Nottingham Kayaking Club and was quickly indoctrinated into the infamous #NORMPLAN training group where he discovered you could combine being speedy and whitewater!

Nick Boreham

The Czechs who came to tea:
the European Canoe Association Cup on the Dee

If I had one word to describe the weather in the UK, it would be ‘changeable’. And, after one of the mildest Autumns the paddling community can remember, the weather changed. The last 2024 European Cups Race was to be held on the River Dee, North Wales, and the Czechs had assembled a small invasion force. Their plan had been to arrive early on Tuesday and tour around the UK, sampling rivers and campsites. But as they disembarked the ferry, they were shocked to find empty rivers and snow blanketing. Then, they turned to the backup plan: Nottingham and my apartment floor.

Anyone who has visited my flat may wonder how I could fit five Czechs plus an additional Slovakian. However, where there is a will, there’s a way, and my unannounced house guests proved adept at tessellating themselves into my limited floor space like a bizarre game of human Tetris.

During the day, Molly did an excellent job showing our guests down the white water course, but the evening sessions, in the dark and sub-zero temperatures on the Trent, shocked our friends. I’m led to believe that over in Czechia, it gets so cold all the rivers freeze, and they all take up more appropriate and sensible sports like skiing. In contrast, the UK climate exists in some anti-goldilocks zone where it never gets cold enough to do proper winter sports but is more than cold enough to be utterly miserable. Yet there is a saying, “There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.” And in the bleak midwinter, bad clothing consists of anything less than a hat, cag, pogies, and at least two thermals. But we paddle on as ice forms on our boats and spray decks freeze like concrete. Getting off the water, Alexandra turned to us and said, “We have a newfound respect for the British; you are very tough!”

While hanging out with everyone for a few days was lovely, one thought had persistently troubled me: The low river levels. Rarely are you unable to paddle the Dee, but as the water gets lower, it certainly becomes more unpleasant. Alex had been over to the racecourse at Llangollen the previous week and had described the experience as ‘crunchy’. With folks travelling from across Europe to come to our little race, it felt embarrassing to show them the UK paddling at its absolute worst.

These conditions (cold and empty) persisted on Friday as paddlers from France and the Netherlands joined the practice sessions on the Dee. However, I’d spent the week making prayers and sacrifices to the rain gods, and fickle as they are, the rain gods answered with storm Bert.

It had rained heavily through Friday night, and by Saturday morning practice, both the river and temperature had risen to much more comfortable levels, although those of us who know the Dee well knew the river level was unlikely to stop there. All rivers in the UK are significantly rain-dependent. Small catchment areas generally mean rivers rise quickly as it rains and promptly fall off as the weather clears up. The Dee is by no means the worst offender, but with the heavy rain melting the snow that still blanketed the hills, we knew there was a lot of water on its way, and yet we still underestimated how much and how quickly the river would rise.

Serpents Tail
As rivers rise, the racing lines down them can change quite dramatically. In the case of Serpents Tail, the rapid we were racing, the line entry to the crux shifts from hard right over towards to left. Both lines converge to fire you through the tight constriction at the bottom, but the change to that entry move is significant. As we sat in the warmth and shelter of the Chain Bridge Hotel watching the river rise, the debate in the British Camp was whether it was worth abandoning all of our practice down the right and whether the river had risen enough to do a ‘Hail Mary’ down the left.

In a standard sprint race, you get two runs, and your final time is taken as the best of the two. But with the river rising as it was, we were almost guaranteed to get a faster second run. Therefore, we were split between two schools of thought: Play it safe, do the first run down the right, then try the second run on the left, or do both runs down the right, with the first run acting as a bit of practice for the second.

By the time I’d made it to the start line, the river had risen even further and was starting to lap around the feet of the volunteers on start duty. I decided to go for the second option, and when the whistle blew, I set off for the left line.

Unfortunately, everything went askew quite quickly. Not only does the line down the crux of Serpent’s Tail change with the level but so does the little lead-in rapid. As the river widened and the waves grew, I was lost and astray from the primary tongues of flow that would carry my speed. Still, I dug deep and worked myself back online to drop into the main event of the rapid. The last time I had run the left line was well over a year ago, but my memory served me well, as I skirted the large holes down the main ramp of the rapid.

However, as I crested the final wave, the river revealed that the end of the rapid, which had previously been the constriction, was now a chunky hole feeding into an undercut on the right. I managed to sneak in a right-hand stroke, keeping the bow up and narrowly avoiding the undercut, but my speed stalled out on the boils behind this, and I once again found myself fighting to reaccelerate the boat as I headed for the finish. It was far from a perfect run, but I now knew what I could do to fix it on my second.

Alas, the second runs were not to be. In the scheduled hour between our first and second runs, the river continued to rise and rise and rise. The river was no longer lapping at the feet of the starters; it was now flooding them. All the timing equipment had to be moved, and the second run was abandoned. Our final times for the last of the 2024 ECA cups would now be taken off the first run alone.

A high-water Dee lap
It was a disappointing end to the race series, but the mood quickly shifted – just because the racing was over didn’t mean the fun had to be! We quickly assembled a rag-tag group of British, French, Dutch, and Czech paddlers to enjoy a rare delicacy: a high-water Dee lap.

We set off in a mega-train so long that it was impossible to see both the start and end of our soggy conga line. It was hard to believe how quickly the river had risen, and the rocks we had stood on earlier that morning to scout the Serpent’s Tail rapids were now deep under the water. We continued down the river, hooting and roaring our way down the full classic course.

Now free of any ill-placed rocks, the Dee was a fast-flowing joy ride down to Town Falls in the heart of Llangollen. We collected ourselves at the bottom with big grins, excitedly swapping the little trials and tribulations we’d experienced during our descents. The rain didn’t abate overnight, and the river continued to rise. We awoke early on Sunday to scout the river and squeeze in a practice run before racing commenced.

Cancelled
However, by the time we’d made it to the top of the course, we received the message from the race organisers that the classic race on the river had been cancelled, the river was now too high, and there were no longer any safe, access or egress points from which the race could be run to a reasonable degree of safety. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but at least there was a backup option: to run the race on the canal.

Llangollen Canal
The Llangollen Canal was dug around the 1790s to transport coal and iron ore from Welsh mines; the canal is renowned for its beauty (and the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct). But, more importantly, it also forms a very convenient loop, allowing canoeists to paddle back to the top of the river section. Our race would go down the canal from Horseshoe Falls to the Llangollen Wharf, dodging treacherous obstacles such as bushes, narrow bridges, and a horse-drawn barge. It perhaps wasn’t the most exciting ‘Wildwater’ course we’ve ever had, but a race is a race, and we threw ourselves into it all the same.

With racing complete, there was just enough time to squeeze in a sneaky, fun lap of the now extremely high Dee (now at 1.78m on the gauge). We assembled a crack little squad of myself, Nicky, Jacob, Freddie, Huw, Leon and Jan and headed down to the get-on. At the start, Nicky gave a quick but serious briefing, a rare thing in river racing that underlined the moment’s seriousness. “This is really, really dangerous. If you swim you are going to lose your boat. It’s going to be really fun, but we just need to be extra careful.”

Strapped jet engines to our boats
We eddied out and blasted down Serpent’s Tail, now transformed into large wave trains and more akin to what we had paddled in Mezzana this year than a small Welsh river. The fun continued downstream, with even the flatter sections featuring enjoyable undulating waves. The river was pumping so fast it felt like we had strapped jet engines to our boats. Perhaps my favourite move was at Mile End Mill, sneaking past stoppers and using the big pillow off the island to make the sharp right-hand turn. While I couldn’t quite shake the nervous energy from knowing the full consequences of a swim, I could not hide my utter joy with a big grin plastered across my face.

We eddied out shortly above the Town Falls section. The usual get-out (above the falls) was now completely underwater, leaving us with few options other than to run the falls blind. This would be their first time running the rapid for Jacob, Freddie and Huw, and we briefed them on the line. The decision was made. They would follow Nicky down while Jan, Leon, and I would sweep at the back, and with that, we would set off for the final rapid.

With the rising river entry, holes to the falls had now transformed into large standing waves. It was so large that once Leon crested the one in front of me, he disappeared from view behind it. Despite their size, I navigated these waves easily, but then, to my alarm, I massively underestimated the size of the boil behind them. The boil turned my boat near-sideways to the flow, and in my fight to get the bow back downstream, I didn’t manage to get over to the balcony. Below, the jaws of the rapid opened up before me, but it was too late. As the river dropped away, I used the lip to swing my bow towards the largest breaking wave of the sequence. That brief moment seemed to stretch out in time as the wave loomed above me, and suddenly, the water engulfed me.

But all was not lost. As the wave bared its teeth, I reached out with my right blade and dug it deep within the bowels of the beast, providing enough purchase to launch myself out the other side. I used the squall of waves behind it to fling my bow into an eddy on the left and regain some composure. Leon was in the eddy on the right, having suffered a similar line. We laughed together quickly before swinging our boats around to crash through the final wave under the bridge and trundle to the get-out. We were beaming as we walked up to the car park, and Jan later remarked it was some of the best big water paddling he’s done!

Results
Despite the cancellation of the race, the weekend was a massive success. Jan had won both the Classic and Sprint. Alex Sheppy scored enough points to win the overall ECA sprint cups series (in MK1), with Freddie bagging third place. Even better, in the WK1, Kerry, Molly, and Emma had taken 1st, 2nd and 3rd overall, a clean sweep for the Brits!

Molly and Kerry continued their ECA cup success in WC1, securing first and second places overall. And, of course, in WC2, the Christie sisters secured another first, with Lona Partick and Laura Milne hot on their heels in second. Jacob Holmes and Rob Jefferies also managed to secure a third-place finish. Meanwhile, while I had come second to Jan by 1.11 seconds in the Classic, I had been the first Brit, making me the 2024 MK1 British National Classic Champion – a lovely end to a fantastic year of paddling.

We said our goodbyes as we left the prize-giving at Chain Bridge Hotel. It had been a whirlwind few days but an absolute pleasure showing our friends around (at least a few parts) of our tiny island. In 2025, we will host another two ECA Cup races, one in Nottingham and another on the Dee. I, for one, can’t wait to see everyone for next year’s adventures.

Feeling inspired?
Head to www.wildwater.org.uk to join the fun!