Wind River on Ice

No footage of actual kayaking but of the put-in and take-out. Is that weird or what!

Slideshow of EJ Etherington's playboat clinic on Lake Cr

OKCC and instructor EJ Etherington had a good turnout out for the first playboat clinic on the season on Lake Creek at 9.5'. These are pics of the class. I've got pics of Devin I'll be putting up seperately as well as a few of Todd Anderson as he and his girl Nicole came through Grassy Lawn while we were there.

till then,

Playboat spot on Butte Creek

Last weekend Devin was off the water after having a day surgery to remove a lump on the inside of his mouth. It's developed since last January when we were down in Jalcomulco Mexico. He bit through his lower lip after running a slide and taking his paddle to his face. Andrew Holcombe was down in Mexico around the same time teaching a clinic with Esprit Rafting and mentioned it took him several stitches and finally a broken tooth or two before he learned to correct it himself. Hopefully Devin doesn't follow that path!! :)

So last Sunday with Butte Cr estimation flows off the Pat Welch's site of 1400 and slowly dropping. Myself, Lisa, Michael Williams, and Andrew met up for the normal run down to the falls that with Michael we've always taken out at. My neck gasket tore at the put-in so I opted to play shuttle bunny and set safety on a few of the log point we saw on the drive up. All wood was ducked and Michael and Andrew fired up Butte Cr Falls without incident. Prior to running the falls I offered them if they wanted to paddle the runout down to the Hiway 213 me and Lisa could pick them up there. I saw several good ledges downstream of the falls past the bridge. They opted for it and off they went.

When we met up at the lower take-out on 213 they both had smiles on their faces and said their was a couple perfect playspots that Michael referred to as good as Lake Creek. At 1400cfs which was juicy for the run above the falls in a playboat. It would be a good idea to maybe take both boats and switch to a playboat or just hit up the play on the lower leg of the run.

Next time it's at similar flows we'll head in with the Biscuit and camera for hopefully a good time.

cheers, Corey

Lake Cr 12/27/8 Video

Video of Devin testing out the Liquidlogic small Biscuit prototype on Grassy Lawn and Mill Wave. As well as myself, Michael and Shannon Williams. The end of the video has what The Horn looks like at 18 feet!

Swollen Sweet Creek Scouting 12/28/8

So I'd heard lots about Sweet Creek near the Lake Creek playboat run for some time but had yet to make the drive downriver to Mapleton and up Sweet Creek Road to the run. With the flooded out Siuslaw at 18.3' there was no chance eith me or Devin would be putting on but we couldn't resist the temptation to drive down and check it out!!

Here's what we saw..... the pics at normal flows around 8.5' are all by EJ Etherington and can be seen on the write up on Oregonkayaking.net. All flood pics are by myself.

Lake Creek Weekend 12/27-28/08

This weekend myself and Devin finally got to see Lake Creek, OR for what it really is and then some. Last year we were only able to make it out for what turned out to be a low run around 8.5 to 9 feet. The good come in around 10.5 and are good with eddy service to 11.5 feet. Friday we decided to head down with Michael and Shannon Williams, weird to say since they just returned after getting married the other week! Congrats ya two.. We planned to head down Saturday morning early, boat, stay the night in Florence and boat again Sunday before returning home.

All went as planned getting down near Mapleton, OR to the creek. As we were driving down I was checking the online gauge located on the Siuslaw River which Lake Creek feeds into near the end of the run. It was coming up from 7.5' Friday gradually and looked to on line for 10.5 to 11.0 for us. We scouted the only real rapid on the run, "The Horn" and got our shuttle done. Michael knows the run very well so he showed us the playspots as we headed down. There are tons of catch on the fly with several named ones like, "grassy lawn","mill wave", "the ledges" and "red hill wave". All were in and we spent most of our time on grassy lawn and mill wave. Devin was finally able to put the prototype small Biscuit through it's paces and he was very excited with it's performance. He's loved his LL Pocket Rocket and now the Biscuit will make that transition into the boat a very pleasant one. During the run the levels kept creeping up and got near 12.0'.

Once done with the run and shuttle we headed into Florence to get a room and eat at the famous clam chowder place "Mo's". Great food at a descent price and we then returned to our room to rest up. During the night the rain kept coming and we found ourselves with just over 16' on the gauge!! Wholly crap! Over 15' it's highly recommended that you're on your game as holes in "the ledges" get very sticky. Luckily for me and Devin was happy to join suit was to hop into our LL Chico and Grande Jefe's instead of the LL Ronin and Biscuit. There would not be much play other than what your could catch as you ripped down river. This isn't a creek at this point! This run rivaled your big water runs like the Lochsa or Crooked in character. Michael only had his playboat so he went down with it and Shannon opted to run shuttle not having a creeker. Good call in my mind.

We put in this time at the upper put-in for a warm up to get a feel of the beast and watch all the wood floating down with us. Creepy watching large tree's to small branches shoot past you when you're on a wave? It also gave me a opportunity to get a feel for my new creekboat! The Grande Jefe is similar in size with the Nomad 8.5 I'd been paddling. I'll compare the two later on. I'm not sponsored like Devin so I have nothing to gain by my opinions. I was very on the Truss with the boat and it proved to perform as I wanted on big water too.

After the warm up we came into "the ledges" starting near the left bank and I watched Michael in his playboat charge over a few large waves. As I crested one I got a glimpse of Michael climbing a huge near river wide ledge hole. What happened next sent a shiver down my spine as I was on the same line. At the top of the hole he was rejected flipping back into the hole and began getting chundered! With what felt time 20-30 mph current I watched for where Michael was getting worked and charged the ledge hole at full speed. I hit the turbo on my shiny red boat and punched the hole within 10 feet of Michael making it through without issue. Michael spent a few in the hole before flushing out after some fun loops. There are multiple ledge holes that you dodge while boat scouting through them. I then found myself in the front and ran "the horn" first. The rapid flushes out at that flow but had some huge waves with laterals crashing in. Good stuff!! Just after "the horn" is another pair of offset ledge holes. At the lower 11.5' we went down the middle in between them. This looked to still be the ideal line. The entrance is a right elbow that wants to push you left as you come into the ledges. We'd initially talked of running the far right but as we creeped around the corner the right hole looked to be scary big and Michael adjusted for the middle line though the holes. It worked quite nicely. The hole was as big or bigger than the next rapid at normal flows, "bus spot". "Bus stop" at 16'+ was nothing but a couple large waves. I briefly caught the first wave and can say I've surfed Bus Stop!! LOL.

"Red hill wave" becomes to ugly holes that Devin spent time in the lower one in the Chico and was happy to playboat out of it. "Mill wave" was in and Michael had a great ride in the wave hole, I blew off being too far surfers right catching it. Devin said he had his best surf in a creekboat on it but the eddy service didn't exist so we were hundreds of yards downstream while he was on it. Bummer...

In the end when we got off the water as Shannon gave me a ride back up to my Subi I found that the creek was at 18.34'!? 18.0' is flood stage for the Siuslaw River and most of the water was coming down Lake Cr. over the Siuslaw. It was just plain BIG!!!



We also went down to Sweet Creek to check it out at flood stage. Pics to come!! As well as video from playboat Lake Creek.

What can you do with a broken creeker? Ideas!

So you creek most of the year and occasionally land on a rock, piton, rock spin, boof a 20' waterfall? By any chance do you end up with a garage full of kayaks? I remember a video from the PDX Film Festival a couple years back my Mike Long in which he is picking through a stack of kayaks to figure the one he wants to take onto the L-Dub. As he grabs one out, he points out the cracks, dents and general shape of the fleet of broken boats much like the Navy does in a ship graveyard.

Only one problem. Steel ships can be stripped and melted down into the next fleet of ships. Not so with the choice of material that gets us down our favorite creeks. There are a few avenues for recycling but to the most part they are just garbage. Even many recycling programs the stuff has no end placement and makes it into the landfill anyway. I've taken that "so called" dangerous asbestos tiles my work removed, triple bagged and I took them to Metro and threw the tiles into a pit not 100 yards from the garbage you took to curb. Hmmm....

Mike Olson or commonly known as "Oly" had given me and my boys a great idea last winter when at New Years they brought out a couple snow sleds made from old creekboats. It's easy to do with a reciprocating saw or other saw.

Here's a few pics of our new Liquidlogic Chico snow sled. It was cut big enough for one or two passengers. The length so far seems to give nice speed on the test run Sunday with the recent and rare dumping of snow in the Portland area.


Devin modeling it out.


Devin and Ryan testing out the tandem capability.


The sled in action at one of Devin's friends neighborhood.

Oddly enough the sled was not my priority of the use of the old Chico shell. It was to be my first attempt at a kayakers x-mas tree? What does that refer to? To me it utilized a broken creek shell, a drill. few strings of lights and a broken paddle. Hmmm... something I have a few of sitting around!! Paddle pieces taken off the river we've carried out and such. I cut the boat in two at the widest point in the midpoint of the Chico for shape and stability with the reciprocating saw, took a 1 1/4 hole saw and drilled through the nose and into the grab opening to place the paddle piece into. I trimmed the length accordingly. Next came the fun part. The lights. I didn't want to just string lights with the wire exposed around the outside. Tree limbs help with that normally so I decided to run the wires internal. Oh boy!! That required taking all the bulbs off the sockets. In this case 100 bulbs. (I was gonna do 200 but two sections of my lights didn't work out of the box so 100 worked for now) I used small style socketed lights with round bulbs for the size and so the round bulbs wouldn't fall back through the holes. 5/16 drill bit did the job.

Ryan was small enough to lay inside the nose and push the sockets into the holes so could put the bulbs on one at a time. This takes a while but it's a fun family project. You can then dress it up as much as you normally would but may need to drill a few hole to attach bulbs or strings on it. Slippery boat is good in the water, not so good to drape ornaments on! :)

Here's a few pics after dressing it a bit. I'm not 100% done yet but you get the idea. Any color would work but the white Liquidlogic plastic gives it a frosted appearance which you normally pay a lot for...


Close of the nose. You can see the bulbs popping through the shell.


A brighter shot to show the kayak tree as it normally looks.


I kinda like this pic for it's night before x-mas look. I'm sure the boys wanta know where the presents are though!

If you have any other uses with pics I'd love to post them as well. I've heard of planters but have no such pics. The mailbox cover on near the White Salmon is a classic too.

cheers!