what happened!?

first trip on the ottawa, doing safety at highwater garvin's chute, middle channel

well, i guess i was working!
like working a lot!
and it was a lot of fun!

the whole summer was ridiculous for waterlevels, the ottawa never made it down to normal low summer flows. which means that we had some pretty intense rafting and a lot of time on buseater. while last year at some point became very repetitive, up to a point where i was fed up with rafting, this years changing waterlevels made it all way more interesting.
being at owl the second year had a few advantagesm, too. lots of work early in the season, sportrafting, some tripleading, really interesting classes at MKC, it was simply way more challenging and entertaining.

of course there were downsides, too. i started the summer with tendonitis, smacked my elbow first dancing and then surfing so hard that i had issues for two months with it and had to take a step back in my boating, which sucked! overall i couldn't go out as often as i wanted to, due to this, infected wounds and some minor issues. i guess there is a price you pay if you are consistantly trying to do as much as possible.
nevertheless, once again the ottawa didn't fail in pushing me a lot. i got into combos, learnt a bunch of new tricks, and spent a lot of time on the water which paid off this fall for creeking, too.
i met a lot of new people, spent some good time with friends, partied hard...

i didn't really make it out to montreal or the rouge throughout the season, the water was simply too high to make it worth it. so there was little to post about and i had a hard time getting stuff done anyways, as life was just too entertaining as it was.

right now i'm staying in vancouver, trying to figure my next steps out. i will spend my winter in costa rica, which is gonna be insane! i will post one or two more updates within the next days, we did a roadtrip over the last month and a half and i'm just sorting out the footage. as soon as i have a bit more downtime and all the video, i'll hopefully be able to post some video, too.
for now just a small appetizer, a few shots from the season, i'll just comment on each of them without trying to paint a bigger picture:

big boat guiding highwater coliseum, the only shot i have of me rafting!
photo erin rayton?

first time high tension
it was a bit low to be prime, but still so much fun! one of the best practice waves, so predictable and so much potential!
this photo is taken by benjamin kraler from austria, we randomly met him and his buddy hannes at the wave. the kayaking world is soooo small!

the bitch came back! buseater in full force, i hated this wave last year, now i can't wait to surf it again! we had something like six weeks of bussy this summer, which is totally unusual.
photo by john jennex

park'n huck in quebec!
i went out for a day with foerster, billy harris and a few more to go creeking near north bay.
this one was big, real big. i took this shot of foerster from a bridge. this massive slide continues under the bridge and then drops down a 10-15ft drop with a nasty left corner.
i was pumped to run it, unloaded my boat and had to find out that there was no outfitting in my boat anymore. thanks mark!

more bussy. man this wave is insane!
photo john jennex

foerster doing his thing. c1ers are crazy!

alright, enough for today, everybody's getting busy around me, kinda awkward...

peace,
sven

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