So back to the easter-story. Prolonged weekend with 5 days of powerpaddling. Actually I was so knackered after the 5 marathon days that I needed a whole week to recover ;-)
For the people who don´t know Kuchl. There are two waves. -1 Wave (running at low water level) and the main wave (running at medium water level) and no wave at normal summer snow melt waterlevels. So the river is pretty much dependent on powerplants and snow melt. Normally Kuchl wouldn´t be running any more no because of the snow melt, but as we havn´t got so much snow this year it is still running. Normally during the week and on weekends it was then most times too low for the mainwave which is the steeper, bigger and greater one. Which means so far the weekend was the time of -1, a really small but nice wave.
Luckily it was really warm during easter and that brought as some water from the mountains which would normally already flood the river and flatten out the waves but this year the amount of water was so moderate that it was just perfect for 3-6 hours a day for the mainwave.
Enough backgroundinformation. Who showed up and what was the performance level?
Well again as nearly every time I go paddling the Dutchies showed up. Actually I think they are following me, but at least I was able to learn some training tricks from their mastermind and coach René Boom. But I can´t disclose them here, as the world would be too stunned or maybe is not even ready for it yet ;-)
But this time not enough that the whole Dutch team was present there was also nearly the complete Slovak and Czech team around. All in all we had great bonfires every night and always enough paddlers in the eddy for small talk...
Level of paddling: To put it bluntly I think the North Americans have to look out, although they are on home turf ;-)
Some Europeans are in top condition and they will put up a good "fight".
e.g. Peter Csonka is throwing every move possible in his rides and sticks them on a amazingly constant level... and Casper van Kalmthout was although ripping the wave...
So let´s see what the worlds bring on. Actually I reckon we all just hope that a huge wave is in and we can all get awesome rides, massive air and have a lot of fun!
Here some pics from the weekend, unfortunately just from the -1 wave as when the mainwave was running we were all too busy catching air and therefore nobody was willing to sacrificy preccious airtime for getting out of the boat and behind the lens...
pictures by Casper van Kalmthout
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