Bruce Lessels is president and co-founder of Zoar Outdoor, a full-service outdoor center in western Massachusetts offering whitewater rafting, kayaking, rock climbing, biking, fly fishing, camping and lodging. Bruce has been pursuing his interests in the outdoors for over 30 years and was a member of the US Whitewater Team in the 1980s. Zoar Outdoor was established in 1989 as the first outdoor center on the Deerfield River in Massachusetts. Since 1989, Zoar Outdoor has offered the best in New England white water rafting trips, kayaking clinics, canoeing instruction, rock climbing classes, fly fishing and bike rentals for adventurers of all abilities, from beginners to experts.
When you've taken eddy hopping to the limit, as far as you're willing to push it and as far as you're willing to uh, feel like you have safety downstream, its time to get out and scout from shore. And that's a way to look at a rapid, you can get out and actually walk along the bank of the river and look at the rapid that you are about to run or maybe you decide not to run and really get a lot of good information about the rapid, about what's coming up, the hazards and all that. Scouting from shore requires a couple of things. Number one, it requires you to be conservative enough and to be, uh, have good enough judgment to decide to scout from shore and not just sort of take every rapid as they come. Some boaters paddle that way and that's how you can get into big trouble, is not knowing when to scout. The second thing it requires is a shore that you can get to, some rapids are in vertical side gorges, very difficult, to nearly impossible to scout from shore. And it that case, unless you are a real expert, probably the judgment there is just to, to portage around the whole section and not even consider it. But in cases where you have a good access to the shore and you can see the rapid well, uh, what you want to do, is just walk down the shore, as you're going down, look for hazards, look for routes, look for ways down the rapids, that maybe avoid those hazards. Often there will be one or two really major issues in the rapid that you have to watch out for and you have to kind of identify those early and think of your routes and ways that you can avoid those hazards and that can allow you to have a smooth run through the rapid. A couple of rules of thumb for scouting from shore, number one is, rapids are always bigger when you get down to them than they are from shore, so especially if you're scouting from forty, fifty, eighty, one hundred feet above the river, um, the rapids going to look a lot smaller at that, from that point of view, than it will when you're actually in it. When you're paddling through it those waves that looked like they were three to four feet high, might be eight or ten feet high and the drops that looked like they were two or three feet high might be eight or ten, or twelve or fifteen feet high in fact. You can't generally see vertical uh, you know, vertical dimensions scouting from above a rapid so it's often very deceiving. It's not a bad idea to go down to the river level and especially on the way back up after you've seen the rapid and you know what you're looking at and if you decide to run it, to go back down to the river level and try to scout right down at the river level, try to get down low where, from the point of view you'll see from the boat and actually check out what the view lines are going to be like, what you're going to be able to see, what you're going to be able to distinguish, sometimes we pick, uh, points to, to key off of, sometimes it's a wave, sometimes a rock, a tree, something like that and some of those points are visible from the boat when you get down to them, but sometimes those points disappear when you get to the boat and what seemed obvious from up above is completely hard, difficult to figure out from down below. So uh, make sure that those are still distinguishable when you get down to the river. And in general you know, when in doubt, scout.
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