Watch me almost drown on the Ottawa River

[Jim Sammons LJKF]

Would of helped a ton if I had thigh straps on the kayak. When you watch it you can see the kayak just kind of stops and I shoot off of it. We have run a lot of WW since this and always with the thigh straps. This just happened to be the first WW of the trip and also the heaviest. My inexperience showed. Ken, who happens to be a former world champion freestyle kayaker, makes it look so easy. He has run this rapid thousands of times, it is in his back yard, and told me I could run this place hundreds of times and 99.9% of the time if you dump you will just float down river. I was the lucky .1% that had to get stuck.
To add insult to injury, three rafts got dumped right before I went down. All of them filled with college age girls, they were all standing on the bank right behind me as I bared my ass.
I have gained a ton of respect for the whitewater since then and have learned a lot. Having done three more WW trips since this one.