Islands of Security

We made a plan last night for me to go and do my first ever 'proper' grade 3 river today - the Halton Rapids.
It rained all night and this morning when I mentioned there was a flood surge warning for the Lune it was quite disturbing to hear the glee in B's reply. So a few hours later I found myself on the banks of the river looking at a lot of bouncy white water.....
Lots of this is new to me, but I'm good at managing risk and I trust B implicitly, so we set off. I was pleased to see the upstream stuff I've been practicing worked - I was less pleased at how much time the front of my boat appeared to be underwater, but I have to admit I was having a whale of a time (yep did that on porpoise....) and was starting to think I'd nailed it - which as any paddler knows was right when I went for what was thankfully the only swim of the day. Obviously I was really pleased my capsize drill worked!
Today's blip was taken from a little eddy caused behind this rock - taking phone out of two waterproof bags, not floating into the flow and getting phone away again all distracted me from how much bigger the choppy stuff looked and just how far away that next rock outcrop was. We spent a long time playing here - B was really pleased I managed to surf the wave in the middle for a while - I was mainly pleased it give my shoulders a rest.

When we arrived Rainchasers had the river at low (0.6m) by the time we left it was "huge" 1.2m - lots of learning in that!
After 25years of climb climb climb - I think I've caught the paddling bug....