another season done...

nobody around anymore at big al's rafting, so i found some time to go through a few of those pictures of this summer. not too many, i've been working a lot lately and didn't get to do a lot of big trips, but that is about to change. RIGHT NOW!
another month of bumming around and putting those ninja wave tricks out on some big stuff before i take off to New Zealand!

just for technique this summer has been wicked! learnt a lot and definately changed my style of boating quite a bit. i guess it was just a different mindset coming from a very relaxed environment here. i still can't believe how easy life is around here. nothing really to worry about, go rafting, kayak after, have a beer at the fire, good people everywhere. i kinda wish this would last longer.
anyways, enjoy the shots...

mr. patrick carter slaying the mighty phil's hole

cornerwave. favourite trick of my summer.

love that shot! pic tiia koskela

pic tiia

alex davies throwin down

wipeout

this was a great view on the way to our put-in

fernando torres, dragons tongue

me. same.

dropping the elevator shaft, pic fernando

peace, out!
Sven

i love pictures!

just really wanted to share those, super stoked on them!
i was out surfing odyssey, a nice little wave that is not being surfed too much as few people know about it. the sun was setting and there was no good photo light at all, so my friend hadleigh thompson tried playing around with longer exposure and i think the shots he got are awesome!
thanks a lot buddy!
no too many, but here you go.

i guess you could tell that i'm having a good time.
yeah ottawa!

yep, right. different wave.
stumbled upon this while cleaning my computer.
buseater
that boat flies.
photo daniel inskip.

off to the sauna.
more soon.

peace,
sven

cornerwave and competitions?

i just got a bunch of shots from colin moneypenny on the oks competition on cornerwave last week. thanks a lot!
cornerwave is one of my favourites on the ottawa. quite the dynamic wave with a sweet surfer's left shoulder, fast and incredibly steep and green in the right levels. competition levels were a bit too high, so it was comparably slow and foamy but still good enough to throw some stuff on.
i've been learning a lot on that wave lately, so i tried to put a few new tricks into my rides.
in the end it placed me 4th, which, considering the other competitors, is quite alright i guess.
i guess they didn't even score some of my tricks (flipturns i think), which might have put me even further up. final ranking for the top five was EJ, Stephen Wright, Joel Kowalski, me, Nick Troutman and Moe Kelleher.

it was a small event, mainly organized for a bunch of juniors paddling with the keeners and also part of the junior olympics or something like that, so there was a lot of waiting and cheering for those kids involved. this also made the pro mens class pretty small, and i guess a delay of 4(!!!) hours until the whole thing started didn't make it any better.

it's weird, cause i usually don't consider myself a competitor, but this time, on this wave, i really wanted to go out and see how good i can do. which means that i was keen!
however, from showing up at 9:30 in the morning and finally competing at around five there was too much time wasted! sorry wilderness tours and oks, nice that you were organizing this, but some preparation and a clear schedule would make this whole thing way more enjoyable!
seeing good boaters as well as spectators leave because of so much waiting makes me think that this is not the greatest way to push our sport. it would be easy to get people involved, especially on a spot like mccoys on the ottawa, so many people came paddling through, got excited that there was stuff going on and then left kinda disappointed when they realized that nothing was happening for the longest time.
anyways, in the end i had a blast and was happy with some consistent rides.
and i think next time there's a competition around i'll still go out. i always do.
i just hope that more people will do so as well.
for the fun of it.

anyways, here are some of colins shots.






peace,
sven

summer can come cause spring was sick!

wow!
time's flying by these days! how is it mid june already?
my life's been a rollercoaster this year! after costa rica and nicaragua i spent quite some time just bumming around in germany, had an amazing time back home in augsburg, got a bit of play in and did a sick trip to corsica (check kanumagazin.de). big thanks to felix hunziger from steep'n wild for saving my ass by giving me riot demos! without him i would've been sitting dry for the spring!
well, after that i headed off for my summer residency. i flew into canada in early may and showed up just in time for some buseater action. it's been over a month now, i've had a few more of those big wave sessions, been surfing high tension on the gatineau, partied, instructed, rafted. and did a little roadtrip out to new york and vermont. no boating BUT i picked up new boats!
yep, i switched this year!
riot has been great over the last years, they've supported me so much! i still think that they have great designs and i hope that they recover well!
however, options came up, and after paddling daniels nemesis for a bit i tried fluid kayaks.
and here i am, two brand spankin new babies with me, nemesis m and solo l. thanks go out to david arnaud and celliers krueger, thanks for all the patience til it actually went down! i didn't get the solo out yet, but the nemesis is really amazing! considering the size of it i was surprised by it's combination of good speed, ridiculous bounce and serious edges. the first rides on buseater were straight up crazy compared to the big astro.
after getting used to it i could get more pop out of combo moves, launch bigger, carve faster. up to the point where it opened up triple combos for me! so i'm pumped to take it out on all those different waves we will have over the summer.
now i just need a new video camera... don't drop cameras out of three meters on rocks. doh!
apart from that things are still the same. thanks to kober paddles for that sweet scorpion neutral bent, awesome blade!
and to artistic sportswear for supplying everything else! head to toe river gear.
anyways, her are a few shots from this spring...

fernando torres on the edge
iron ring, ottawa

flashback
photo by caley mulholland

combos in pics? hard.
halfway through a flash forward to back stab

dave nieuwenhuis showcasing some local expertise!

finally getting those airscrews straight!
photo by daniel inskip

iron ring again
photo fernando torres

big bus.
photo emre bosut

getting used to the edges...

thanks to everyone who provided the photos! i'll try to not slack off as much as usual and keep those updates going. with a few motivated photographers around it should be a good summer for that!

peace out,
sven

a canadian season...

alright, same vid as in the post before, but now in a little bit higher quality.
still haven't figured the ideal filesize-quality ratio out, but also didn't want to make it too big. anyways, have a look yourself.

anything else?
well, after all my gear is here now i am pumped to take off for an 18 day spring roadtrip in three days...
austria, switzerland, italy and then CORSICA!
which for you dear readers (does anyone actually read this or is it more about the pictures, the videos...?) means that there will be more posts!

wow!

a canadian season starring alex davies, sam ewings, neil gibson, andy hill, stephan paetsch, sven perschmann and darcy scott-northmore!


a canadian season from sven perschmann

peace,
sven

back home and a new vid

hi folks!
don't really feel like writing a lot right now.
but i finally managed to find the time to finish the clip of my last summer in canada. and i am happy with the result! a higher res version should be up soon.
apart from that no big news these days. after spending three months in costa rica i took over a month off from kayaking, the longest time in the last three years or so!
and now i am back in augsburg, staying with a bunch of good friends, boating quite a bit.
and looking forward to corsica end of this month!
anyways, lean back, take another sip from that coffee and join our trip.

my canadian season from sven perschmann on Vimeo.

right.
something was missing.
what's a post without pictures?

well.
i have a video.
should be enough, shouldn't it?

ahm.
whatever.
micha schomann and myself.
black forest.
photos by micha and me.
makes sense.

skookumchuck!

what a spot!

every kayaker has a list of things to do, runs to run, waves to surf. and anyone who ever surfed big waves would be lying if they say that skookumchuck was not on that list.

when i first started whitewater kayaking i saw pictures of that wave that left me awestruck. people were surfing this monster of a wave, getting air, green grinding...

at that point i never thought that i would one day be able to do something like that. now, almost ten years later i have surfed waves that are bigger and faster, there has been tons of skooksfootage from boaters around the world. often enough so much coverage takes some magic away from places, you almost feel as if you know them too well already.

not skooks though!

the power this whole place has is beyond anything a picture could capture. seeing the wave appear out of nowhere, surfing it as it is forming, gettingh washed downstream on the tour on a fine line between massive boils and freakwaves, seeing sealions surfing waves and hissing at people, big boats cruising by as you are surfing on oceanwater, then watching skooks peak and green out, come back for a bit and slowly disappear into calm water again... simply incredible!

we made it an even bigger experience by camping out on an island next to the wave for five days! filled up our playboats to the brim with everything we needed and then pulled them behind the creekboats. from egmont it is something like a 40 min paddle at slacktide, so we only left the island once to get watersupplies and stuff we had forgotten.

it was a great time, but we also had a bit of an epic:
the first day there was a big SAR mission going on, cause the night before a guy that wanted to drop off his boat at the wave went missing.
turned out he simply didn´t recognize the spot where the wave forms and paddled way past it and eventually made it to the next seddlement to hitchhike back the next day. too bad that he wanted to meet someone there and never showed up...

and i had a pretty solid swim!
getting a mild trashing in one of the waves futher down my knee slid out of the thighbraces i hadn´t adjusted yet and thus popped my skirt. i had to swim through three gigantic whirlpools, got a lot of downtime, almost ran out of breath at one point and lost my paddle! scary shit.
didn´t lose the boat, luckily, but i still had to handpaddle back over to the island, quite exhausting.
the next day i borrowed foerster´s paddle and broke it on my third ride, forcing me to paddle back to egmont c1-style. took me about an hour and a half, it sucked! at least that was our last day anyways...

our camp on the island

chill times, we even brought a boardgame!

davies going for a good old brainwash...

sam ewings styling his flashbacks

and so is foerster

andy hill... going clean, going big, but how is this supposed to end?

the only action shot of myself, thanks to gill crawley!

something was weird about the tides, the wave greened out a lot.
which left us watching this guy cruise for a long long time.

yeah man, you rock!

what a shitty view to wake up to, heh?

peace out everyone, next updates should be costa rica. it just started raining again.

lost and found...

so, a little break!
i had a lot of downtime lately, hanging out at my place in turrialba, costa rica. it was raining non-stop, and as i don't have a creeker yet to run the crazy stuff that's going off right now (soon though, so soon!) i started going through this years video footage. i stumbled upon a bunch of stuff from augsburg this winter and spring and thought that i might edit a little clip with it. same same, me trying to figure out the washing machine on the eiskanal. it probably had a bit of coverage this year anyways, as it was part of the worldcup.

i also got way more footage than this, of all the ahoicrew, but that'll have to wait for a bit of a bigger videoproject.

but anyways, here is my take.
while i was editing it a lot of memories of a-town came up, close friends and places, i spent five years in that city... so everyone back home: sending you a lot of love from the other end of the world!



augsburg2008 from sven perschmann on Vimeo.

western canada!!

okay folks, once again I have been slacking off. no, there was no two weeks break on the road trip, it's just that i am in costa rica now!!!
so i have been kinda busy with adjusting to the place i will be living in, finding a place, a job. and i succeeded, it's all set now. i will write about costa rica later though, only so much right now: it is an amazing place, so different than everything i have done before!

back to canada though!
after kelowna we went on a mission for some creeks in bc, and got pretty lucky. especially considering that it was bone dry for the first part and then too rainy and cold for the last.

we made it down:
the spillimacheen - awesome low volume creeking, nicest moves being a slide into 90° drop, tons of fun boofs and then a nice little twenty footer (foerster broke his paddle, popped his skirt and still didn't swim!)

the jordan - even less volume but some good tight and steep lines, one slide into autoboof where skipped across the pool into the next unscouted rapid

the box canyon of the illesillewaet - even in lowest water still somewhat pushy, fun run

the perry - too low when we ran it

the soo - a lot like the oetz in austria, shallow, fast, dirty, some fun moves but not my fav

the upper cheakamus - fun class IV, on sweet sweet boof!

the callaghan - three times, big playground including sketchy little boofs, attempts on grinding logs down drops, a good 25/30footer and lots of steep bouldergardens. highlights? neil getting trashed at the bottom of the drop.

the ashlu: mini mine, pretty high, pretty fast, pretty sweet (except for that i dented my boat, argh!)
BOX CANYON!!!!! what a beautiful run! class IV/V, bryan smith took us down, almost no scouting, sick lines, complete commitment, no way to get out. it was great to finally run it, i had heard so much about it and it surpassed all expectations. the downside was that we got to see how much progress the hydro companies have made already, the run is gonna be dry from next year (?) on, DAM!!!! check therangelife.blogspot.com for some info on the protest and the other intense stuff those guys are pulling off, there are some gems around!

the area around whistler and squamish is considered to be the adventure capital of canada, and i can totally see that now that i've been. sea to sky, everything from coast to big mountains, so much stuff to be done here!
i will definately come back for a while, maybe even try to work there for a while.

oh, i talk and talk, and no shots? well, to be honest, i don't have too many, as i lost my battery for the slr, so we only took video of most of the runs. just be patient, it'll go online at some point...
and there still are a few...

what a day! sunshine, nice creek, good lines...

davies. jordan.

that boof turned out so well that i skipped the pool and went straight into the next rapid. unscouted...

me. jordan. stomp!

foerster and davies. jordan. boof.

outch! what where you thinkin!
foerster. callaghan.
(also the last shot before i lost my/ran out fo battery...)

there were some chill times, too!

and sometimes having some time away from the boys is sweet, too ;)
enjoying the view over the ashlu valley.

yours truly from turrialba, costa rica.

sven

p.s.: it´s raining like crazy here, hasn´t stopped for six days!

winching!

pow! so what does that mean? well, part of our trip out west was a stop in kelowna, to visit our friend darcy.
soo, kelowna is quite the f****ed up city i can tell you. we went out to party hard, got asked for drugs all the time and the general vibe on the street was super aggressive. definately not the right spot for river hippies like us.
anyways, that's not the story.
literally beaten up (outch!) we decided to take it easy the next day. darc and his roommates had a winch with a 600ft rope for wakeboarding. so there was our plan!
we drove to the lake nearby (deepest lake in canada?), set it up and had a few testruns. the boys were rockin their skimboards and wakeskateboards in good fashion and we took our boats out.
being a bit sketched at first, as the water was pretty shallow all the way out we took it easy at first.
after a few rides of getting used to it we worked our way up to throwing tricks.
man, that thing is fun! if i'd ever be somewhere without any play, i'd get one of those.
my favourite was the airscrew, but i can see almost any trick possible, you can get quite the bounce out of the up to 17mph this thing generates.
and this is were the shallow water came in handy, we could film and shoot from so close. i was even able to use my flashlight. made for some good shots i think, but check it out yourself!

the beast!

darcy styling it!
oh, and it was not as warm as it looks.

only downside: handpaddling out 600ft for each ride: davies

neil doing his thing!

did i say flashlight?
zzzzzipppp!

who would beat someone with such a hat?

alright, gotta catch my flight to costa rica in the next minutes, gonna keep posting though!

peace out,
sven