After spending one week in corsica testing my brand new ZET VELOC designed by the Czech Honza Lasko here my first update from the isle of beauty.
Having my new VELOC on the roof of my car for about 4 days I was dying to drop onto the first river to try it out. Taking the morning ferry from Livorno to Bastia I had to exercise myself in patience for another 4 hours. It was a sunny morning and we were sitting on deck enjoying our first french breakfast with Café and Croissant watching the coastguard helicopters doing some on-ship-landing practices. So it could have been worse ;)
Program for the first week was to check out as many rivers as possible which are suitable for kayak teaching on the isle of beauty. So we went straight from the ferry to Milous Camp Ernella and started with the Tavignano gorge. The river offers easy class III-(IV) whitewater and leads through a beautiful deep narrow gorge. It was a pleasure to test the youngest child VELOC out of the ZET factory. Catching every eddy on the way down through the gorge I quickly got in touch with the speed of the boat. It blasted through smaller holes on the way down almost without loosing any speed.
Next test ground was the upper Golo - a tiny little bony Creek. After spending the hole winter paddling chilean big volume rivers I have to admit that it hurt to test my brand new baby on this bony run. Nevertheless it was good to see how agile VELOC turned around all this mean little rocks in my way. Anyway I´ll wait for more water to run the upper Golo next time… Same deal at the middle Vecchio the day after. So, when I heard the rain drumming on the roof of my car that night I was falling asleep again with a smile, dreaming of the next day. It was monday coming up - Travo day. Once at the put in the gauge showed 1,40m and VELOC got the chance to demonstrate its performance in more powerful whitewater. It was a fun day on the river with the world famous "dome" and slides in californian style and we where able to run even the lower part almost without touching any rock.
The next classic on our list was the Fium Orbo. It was really low and we decided to skip it and head straight to the Taravo on the other side of the island. After spending the evening in the hot springs of Guitera-les-Bains meeting another group of German Kayakers we felt well prepared for the next days mission - paddling 3 sections class IV whitewater at once. Not knowing the river we hurried down to the take out in record time. There we had to wait for the other paddlers we met the evening before and were friendly enough to do the shuttle for us… unfortunately after their own kayak trip. So we were waiting for them for about 5 hours which was not too bad as long as it was sunny and warm. But once it got dark it became uncosy cold and we prepared ourselves to spend the night outside. Luckily at 9 pm they appeared and we were happy that our little epic came to an end with warm clothes and "pizza à emporter" in Ajaccio.
On our way back to Camp Ernella we checked the flows of the Vecchio and the Fium Orbo. Both had higher flows and we got to run the Fium Orbo. It was still on the low side of good. So VELOC had to cruise around plenty of rocks again. For the next four weeks we wish the weather to stay as sunny and warm as we enjoyed it the last week and all the snow, which is still up in the mountains, to melt down constantly and bring us good water levels!
Cheers from Anne out of corsica having fun with her brand new VELOC!
