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A Paddle
A raft
A multi move rapid to practice in
Tagging eddies
Raft Rotation
Boat Control
In this lesson, Trevor is sharing how to deal with tight, sharp, or blind river bends by rotating away from the bend in the river. Counter rotation builds on our eddy catching skills by using a technique called eddy tagging where rafters drop the edge of their boat into an eddy and use that to pivot them around to reset their momentum along a different vector.
If you ever played the game tag when you were a kid, the theory of eddy tagging will start to make sense. Simply put you want to move up to and just tag or lightly tap an eddy with the edge of your boat. The important question is why would we want to tap an eddy and spin our boat. Eddy tagging allows you to bleed velocity to counteract the force of your momentum. This is helpful when you are heading too fast down river and you need a second to reevaluate your route.
By making a controlled spin into an eddy you buy enough time to take a couple second breath and see where the river is going. You are not trying to bury the boat into the eddy with the goal of catching the eddy, it is just a gentle tap. The goal is to blow out of the downstream part of the eddy and simultaneously reduce your speed which the eddy helps you do by sucking the boat into the vortex on the eddy fence.
Counter rotation builds upon the principal of eddy tagging by using the suction from the vortex to reset your velocity into the vortex rather than downstream. By burying the boat into a vortex, it allows you to quickly point upstream and drive away from a particular current vector. This technique allows you to use full forward strokes to drive upstream and on the new vector. By doing this you can take advantage of forward strokes rather than back paddles.
Back paddling is 40% less efficient than forward strokes so you gain more efficiency when you need to change the vector of your boat’s velocity quickly. To sum it up you want to quickly and efficiently change directions by using the river rather than your body. It is important to note that this is a paddle technique and not a rowing technique so it is likely to result in the opposite effect with oars.
Counter rotation is most useful when you have the current heading in one direction, say river left, and the river makes a sudden and immediate turn to river right for example. You don’t want your momentum heading left because you will have to quickly move back right. Since rivers have many irregular shorelines with vortices and eddies on each side it is probable that an eddy exists on the outside bend of the river behind an obstruction. if this is the case in the example above you can drive your front left tube into an eddy while you begin spinning away from the turn, that is spinning left.
By tagging the eddy fence you are effectively burying the front left tube into the vortex on the eddy fence. The vortex will try to suck the raft in and thereby pinning that section of the raft in place. To do this you want to set your momentum in the direction of the eddy by forward paddling just enough to tag the eddy fence but not enough to blow through the fence. After your momentum is set, you need to begin your spin and start turning away from the direction the river is turning, in the example above the right will go forward and the left will go back to execute a counter clockwise spin…to the left.
While the bow is pinned in place by the vortex from the eddy fence, the stern of the boat will remain in the current with the momentum of the stern and the power from the paddlers on the downstream super critical flow carrying the raft around in a circle. At this point the side of the raft will impact the eddy fence and either bury into it or get rejected by the turbulent flow. Ideally if you spin quickly enough the left edge in this example will be buried in the eddy causing the boat to feel like it is rolling left. if you execute the move correctly the left edge will remain buried so the right side of the boat is the high side. with the weight over to the left the stern should glide onto the eddy fence and slow the boat’s momentum.
if the boat turns quickly enough the left edge should remain buried downstream and you may begin to surf on the eddy fence. After this the raft will surf back on the current with the left side of the boat downstream and the bow facing upstream. this momentary shift of weight will allow the raft to surf back across the current to river right. When the raft is facing upstream both sides of the boat need to begin paddling forward to begin counteracting the right left momentum in our example and riving from left to right. If everything is successful the entire spin should take no more than 2 seconds.
Counter rotation when properly done make rafting look super clean in highly adverse scenarios, however it can also go horribly wrong in the crux move of a rapid. Due to the probability of uncontrolled spins, here are a few safety tips to consider:
Broadsiding an eddy too slowly or in too strong of an eddy fence will cause the side burying into it to come to an extremely violent stop possibly ejecting the crew onto the rocks or into a rapid.
Take time to understand how quickly your boat rotates so you know if you have enough time to pull a counter rotation or eddy tag.
Be careful with unexpected amounts of weight in your boat because it will change the dynamics of how quickly you will change directions.
Take careful note of the size and strength of the eddy you intend to tag since there is a strong correlation to the size and strength of the eddy fence and how hard it will grab your boat.
