The Ardeche 11th - 14th July 2010 Day 3

Day three began with a bit of a shock... in the form of the BIGGEST caterpillar in the universe (well...) crawling out of my shorts when i was in the toilet....definately woke me up somewhat..! Anyway we began in the fresh morning light and we set off towards our first rapids of the day. It wasnt long before we stopped and had a play with ferry gliding, eddying in and out, and general basic river skills. We stopped a bit further down too on a rapid nicknamed flipflop (sound of a naked man running....lol) and worked on poling - I managed to not fall out of my boat at all and have a relatively good go, Badger had a bit of an epic face plant into a rock which was i have to say a bit funny but i know it hurt a lot so i did feel sorry for him but we managed to catch the boat so it was all good besides his nose...Chris had a pretty good crack at it too and managed to cut his leg on rock falling out...and Kieran in truly showing off style after a few attempts poled up the entire thing which was pretty cool :) All in all a pretty good laugh. We moved a bit further down to another rapid (possibly the next one) and did some throw bag work, swimming down rapids trying to avoid rent-a-crash and pulling each other in. Attempted rethrows but learned one thing....GET IT RIGHT FIRST TIME! The rest of the day we led rapids, talked about group leadership, river tactics and did a lot of forwards paddling which in my case was much improved by the end of the day. We also stopped randomly on the side of the river to go explore a mini cave which was awesome, and also stopped at an old leper colony which actually was brilliant, a hidden gem in the sides of the river. We ended the day at Sauze, where Marty came to pick us up with the boats and we stopped for ice cream and a final swim in the Deche...gamball!! We headed back to Segs - where we showered and went for pizza :) and had a few drinks....happy days :)