ThePADDLER 6
STEFFAN MEYRIC HUGHES
Quitting the sugar
One of the tragedies of kayaking is that our sport is so under-represented ( by its own practitioners ) in books and film . We have no Touching the Void , Dog Town and Z Boys or Endless Summer , which cemented rock-climbing , skating and surfing in the imaginations of a much broader audience .
There are no really good books , like The Longest Silence ( fishing ), Coasting or Riddle of the Sands ( sailing ) or Into Thin Air ( mountaineering ). Whitewater paddlers with interest in freestyle must survive culturally on a high-sugar diet of endless YouTube clips of unfeasible tricks pulled off on impossible-looking waves and monster rapids , interspersed with music . As diets go , it ’ s something akin to basing a long-term survival strategy on something you occasionally really want – like trying to live solely on Haribo or KFC in my case , but let ’ s not get into that .
After barely paddling for a year through lockdown and , if I ’ m honest , the sub-zero temperature spell and the pressure of home-schooling and work as well , there has been little to entertain : the Bad Whitewater Kayaking Advice Tips Facebook page was fun for a while – a legend perhaps , in its own short lunchtime – before being mass-trolled by Jackson haters and feral raft guides .
The dozen or so kayak books I have ( I suspect that ’ s the whole canon ) vary in quality between unreadable to interesting ( to me , as a paddler ), but I can see why none has yet had the force to ‘ transcend its genre ’, as people are fond of saying . And I ’ ve read them all – at least once .
These days , I only watch Bren Orton ’ s videos . Sure , it ’ s in the Haribo genre , but they are so good ; they ’ re more like Tangfastic than Star Mix . That seal launch on the Wellerbrucke … kickflipping out of Champions Killer … insane . Then there ’ s the Dudh Kosi video that I ’ ve seen probably 20 times . It ’ s genuinely brilliant , probably the best film of its genre , but these days , I watch it for the comic wonder that the paddlers ’ ‘ foul weather gear ’ consists of black gentleman ’ s umbrellas . And that crazy-looking 70s helicopter that clatters in at the end . It ’ s such a joke to a fellow paddler and me that I had a cartoonist draw the helicopter scene on a set of mugs for his wedding present . It was an economical yet imaginative present , I thought , and history has proved the mugs ’ worth : they have outlasted the marriage .