Broken Car, Mini Bus and Quebec Roadtrip

good morning!!!

yep, that's what it can look like when i wake up in the mornings. not too shabby!
i guess it's been a while since i updated this, mainly because we're still in ridiculously high levels for the season.
this summer at the ottawa has been very rainy so far. so rainy actually that we're not even close to all the low water play levels. no cornerwave, no garburator, very limited play on the two main runs and no good park'n play at all, which makes it hard to get personal boating in, especially as we're in full rafting season now.
rafting is awesome though! we've had highwater coliseum levels for a while now, and that can mean a 50/50 chance to make it through the rapid, motorboat safety at the bottom...
feels almost like kayaking.
and i guess a total of over a month of buseater is not too bad either.
sad news are that my car left me. it actually didn't just leave, it peaced out with a bang!
apparently you need a driveshaft and multijoint to drive the good old aerostar.
RIP!

but the next day totally made up for that! buseater sessions are just awesome. the wave was in so long that people actually started getting bored? i had a blast! some early morning sessions, some full days spent, sore backs and smashed elbow and some decent airtime is how i would sum that up. but check out yourself!

dave pierse about to drop in

carving some green

working my ka-y's

silly flip, cab screw, call it what you want!

oh, and we still made it out for some boating!
riot kayaks hooked up the owl/mkc instructors and guides with some nice deals! these guys spend every day on the river and now they do it in style!
so we got a few days off, took alex davies' chevy venture and, after a really slow start made it to montreal and the riot factory. four of us, eight boats and a bike (!!) on a little adventure!

now that's a load...

first night we hung out in montreal, surfed lachine which was way too high still and partied a bit at a friend's place. next morning we loaded the car again and moved on towards quebec city.
our first stop was the shawinigan slides, just a fun park and bobsled, not too hard but tons of fun! the huge thunderstorm and hailshowers made it a pretty good adventure!

dave pierse

big boats are a blast

the big final slide

running it trainstyle, three magnums grinding

after one night in a cheap-ass motel and a few beer at a local pub the next stop was the tewkesbury section of the jaques cartier river. none of us knew this run, it was above rafting cut-off and the guides we met didn't really wanna run it this high.
apparently the water went up two feet within two hours before we put in. it felt big!

davies in lead, dave chasing him down

there were some big lines. dave pierse tackling one of them

alex

after hours on dirtroads and few right turns too many (thanks alex!) we made it to the neilson, a classic quebec run. 10 km's and countless drop'n pool rapids. we spent six hours on the run, scouted twice and were as exhausted as could be at the very end. great run! fair, technical, and it just keeps going and going. great to practice your boat scouting i guess!
we spent so little time out of our boats and it rained quite a bit, so i only have shots of the very last rapid.

J.T. Hill about to boof

looking back it looks as if we actually got some boating in...
well, flipped my first big raft in coliseum today, gotta have a few beer on that.
of course rafting style. yours truly from owls guide ghetto, sven.

Back in Canada 2008!

allright!

i don't even know where to start!

i'm back over in canada, three weeks already! i had a great winter in augsburg, hanging out with some of the best people ever. it's been four and a half years in that city, i had such a good time! nevertheless i really wanted to get back for another summer on the ottawa and for the next years wanna keep traveling, see a bit of this world. so here i am, gonna be working for owl and mkc, rafting and instructing and trying to boat as much as i can.
i got a bunch of shiny new gear this summer, so this is gonna be fun!
thanks to kober for the sweetest paddles i've ever owned. scorpion foam core neutral bent, nice!
artistic is keeping me warm and dry while it's still cold on the rivers, riot keeps me floating in style and tatonka is helping me out with some tough bags, jackets and other stuff. thanks so much!

even though things didn't really start out the way i had planned, it still was awesome so far.
i came to canada with tendonitis, and the way i am i didn't really take the time to recover, always went out boating at least one day too early. so in the end i missed out on a few things, creeks were already too low when i finally found the time to head out, i couldn't even go on the roadtrip i had planned. the good thing was that this made me set up my place for the summer real good. i was the first person to show up at owl, had a free choice about where i'm gonna stay and had so much time that i built a house! well not literally, but at least it's wood instead of tarps as walls, i got a proper bed, shelves, a deck... yes!

and i still got out!
i first went to montreal, got my brand spankin new riot boats, astro 58, magnum 80 (that thing is huge!!) and a thunder, ran the super high mulet river with vince normandeau, hung out with fabi and almut (thanks guys!) in montreal, went to chambly just to see tons of divers swimming down the wave (they call it frog day i guess, so no boating there). got my car back, it survived the winter!
i also did quite a bit of boating with stephan "foerster" paetsch who's gonna be back on the ottawa, too, as well as with some of the other riverrun guys. ran the main and middle channel in super high water, got mangled, caught a few sweet surfs and even had to swim after a good beatdown in the lost channel! i went to ottawa, surfed a new, epic and super sketchy wave called "heavy d". imagine garburator on steroids, just huge and fast! not too many surfs on that one, as it was hard to catch and if you miss the eddy it would take half an hour to get back to the wave. big thanks to alex davies for always being in for a mission and erin rayton for some sick photo skills and a lot of patience with us and ten million angry seagulls!
this is one of the few times were i really would've appreciated a jetski, such an annoying eddy...
also been out to the rouge again, hippie canada rules! i love coming back to that place!

anyways, i got a bunch of pictures to share, guess i'll stop babbling now.
throughout the summer i'm gonna try to get quite a few updates up, gonna be writing for the riot blog and will write some travel reports for tatonka (in german). i'm pumped! enjoy the shots!

this is gonna be my summer residence
when i'm coming back it's gonna be all grown in!

stephan "foerster" paetsch styling highwater dragon's tongue, ottawa

river rundomness, wylie and andy are so cool!?

heavy d!
photos: erin rayton

seagulls dig boating... not!
photo: erin rayton

urban kayak: champlain rapids, city of ottawa, facewash
photos: erin rayton

look at alex's grin... creepy!

shoot'em up!

saddler's wave, ottawa
photo: alex davies

alex catching some air!

mr alex davies again. big bus!

ocean surf? big buseater, ottawa!
photo: alex davies

rouge river, sweet session we had!
photos: alex davies

lovin' it!
photo: erin rayton

peace, out

Sven

quartett - new video

okay, this was our entry to the 11th international kayak filmfestival held in rosenheim this february.
this clip is brought to you by:
ahoishop, bootfahrer, jens klatt and strohmeier bros under the synonym of 3zu1 produktion.
shooting the intro and quartett sequences was just too much fun!
thanks so much to our wonderful actors!
and to all the others mentioned in this video: we love you!

i'll stop babbling now.
please enjoy,
sven


quartett from sven perschmann on Vimeo.

oh, one warning: it's all german!

roemerfall

last weekend was awesome!

four days and so much happened.

micha scouting

the plan was to leave augsburg saturday morning. unfortunately the weather forecast wasn't the best at all. there was a big storm coming in from the north and its peak was supposed to hit the alps in the early afternoon. so matze, micha and i decided that it probably wasn't the best idea to hit the road in an old VW bus with a bunch of boats on the roof. we'd simply been blown away i guess.

roemerfall, photo micha

so we waited til the peak had passed us, checked the traffic reports (traffic jams everywhere, trees on the autobahn...), waited a bit longer and then finally headed off towards austria.

micha dropping in

the next morning the first river we hit was the brandenberger ache, one of the most beautiful runs in the northern alps. the nice thing about the brandy is that it has everything. small drops, bouldergardens, slides and pushy rapids. i hadn't run it in a while, which made it even more fun.
everybody had good lines and i even ran the "strahl", a rapid i always portaged the last times due to a hole feeding into a mean undercut.

late boof, photo matze

next thing up was kuchl, a really nice wave. the storm had brought lots of rain over night and brought the levels up. kuchl needs to be rather low - too bad that this time it wasn't. even the lower waves were almost flushed out. it still provided some good airtime, but it was so green that it was super hard to stick the moves. nevertheless a nice session just before sunset. exhausted i joined the other guys for a few beers...

matze a bit off line

with the last days being rather cold and stormy sunday came as a surprise, sunshine and temperatures of around 16°C proposed a good time!
a few days earlier i had seen pics of a drop close to kuchl called "roemerfall".
i've been to kuchl almost every year for the past eight years or so and never even heard of this one. and it turned out to be a really sweet drop. it is just above a really old roman bridge in vigaun and drops into a small gorge. the bridge is one of the oldest bridges in that area and still lasts car traffic. the drop itself is half slide half drop, measuring a total of around 8m, so it's pretty nice to practice late boofs. the pool was surprisingly pushy but good to go. we did quite a few runs, i had a bout six i think. for matze it was his biggest drop yet and it was sweet to see him style it on his first try. this was also the only photosession we did that weekend, the rest of the time we were too happy to just cruise down the rivers.
enjoy the shots taken by matze and myself.

slippery i guess, photo matze

after the drop we checked the lammer gorge nearby. i've run it several times, at normal flows it's a super scenic run. a first look from the bridges showed that it was pumping this time! it all seemed good to go so micha and i gave it a shot. lots of the steep walls in there are undercut and it gets so narrow that you don't even want to know how deep you would go if you'd swim. nevertheless it looked more than managable.
to cut things short: it was super fast and fun run, micha got trashed in the very beginning but made it out of that wall to wall hole and i did some unintentional holeriding at the very end of the gorge. lesson learned (again): scouting from far above makes you underestimate difficulties a lot.
again we finished the day off with a few beer and we cut my hair! i've had long hair for nine years now and got a bit bored of always looking the same. so i took some vodka, matze a swiss army knife and micha his camera and we did a bit of a barber session...

the garage and the trusty old vw

the next day temperatures dropped 15°C! it even started snowing.
so we decided not to go boating, went hiking and then headed home. well, at least we tried.
we made about ten km's and then the car broke down. automobileclub, vw bus on truck, next garage, broken part not in stock, one more night in the snow on the garage's parking lot in a pretty boring small village. damn! the next day everything was fine again so off we went.
this time we took twice as long for the ride home as usually due to some annoying traffic in and around munich.

mind the mullet, photo micha

awesome weekend, can't wait to go out again.

sven

getting the shot

due to the last "warm" days we went out for a photoshoot yesterday.
our crew consisted of daniel krummreich, seppi strohmeier, jens klatt and myself. jens had the idea of taking some shots of the rissbach for the upcoming kanumagazin issue and so off we went.
there have been tons of pics already, but it's really hard to get good shots as the gorge is so narrow that you barely have good light. so jens installed a pretty sick remote flash system to enlight us!

the whole crew

2nd and 3rd drop

the rissbach gorge is a super classic run. there certainly is a bit of a hype about it, the reason being the first and highest drop. it would be the most relaxed boof ever, if it wouldn't be for those nasty undercuts. even at those low flows we ran it at it's quite pushy at the bottom and you definitely don't want to land too far left as you'd probably have a mean encounter with the deep deep undercut that goes all the way behind the drop.
it's one of these simple move - bad consequences drops, but if you can trust your boof it's good to go. you just should be 100% sure that you can do it, cause a swim would be horrible, especially as you can't get out of the gorge once you're in.
then there are two more smaller drops. at higher flows you can simply boof the first to the right, at our level it was a bit more tricky but still okay as it wasn't that pushy. the last ledge is a nice little ramp into a narrow channel, pretty fun.

we ran the whole thing four times, walking back up after every run.
during the AKC-meetings people have run it up to 25 times in one day. they didn't wait for cameras and it was quite warm in fall, but still i wouldn't even try to walk up there that often. respect.

all in all it was a super nice day, sunny weather, still so much ice in the gorge, everybody had sweet lines and i think jens got quite a few sick shots.
so enjoy jens' pics and my video.

wintertime

first drop

seppi sailing into the fridge

daniel lining up for the first one

verry nice, i like!

La Malate!

saturday, sept 2nd, 4 o´clock in the morning. martin's trying to pick me up, deaddrunk...
well, at least we´re finally on our way. us that is ahoi-riders martin koll, micha schomann and myself. the last three days we were hoping for the water to come back up for la malate on the river doubs in northern france. we constantly checked the gauges and weather forecasts for doubs area. at first it looked as if we wouldn't have too much luck. we already were ready to go throughout the week, but then the levels dropped on us.
so it wasn't until friday evening until some heavy rains brought the already high water back up to perfect levels for the wave. we immediately decided to drive that night, 600 km to go, three guys in a tiny opel corsa, a weekend to spend.
it took some time though til we got there. we were not on the water before 2:30 in the afternoon, spent too much time picking up my astro 58 and trying to avoid the expensive highways in switzerland and austria didn´t help either. oh, and no worries, martin got sober again, he seemed to enjoy a pretty good sleep in the trunk of his car...
nevermind, this wave is one of europe's best, a huge green wave feeding into a massive hole.
at levels of around 500cm³ you kinda have eddy support, but you don´t really wanna go through this hole. so we carry back up after every single one of our rides.
and it´s so worth it!
after getting used to the sheer size of the hole we´re all fired up and everybody tries to push themselves a lot. but i guess pictures can tell a bit more, and how about a video?
also check out ahoishop for some more pics of the other guys.

all pics courtesy of micha schomann, freestylefoto

peace, out
sven