Ocoee Drawdown is a special time. It's not cold, but you can tell winter is coming. Except for this year, where the weather was in the 80s. It's a time of peace and quiet on the Ocoee, where you can find your way. Except this year, with the sadness of its impending end. 2018 is the last year of the last licensing agreement. While there was a lot of confusion about whether Drawdown would continue, it's on the release schedule for 2018. That said, it's not expected for 2019.
For the first time in my trip coordinator experience, I actually knew who was coming a week in advance. While I was staying all week, this was a strange trip, as every day or two I changed paddling companions.
I've run a novice trip at the end of April (with a few notable gaps) since 1996, normally just non-boating friends that I've dragged along. I pick the end of April because it's the best window for possibly having water yet being warm enough for novices. A common complaint I hear is that the club needs to post more novice trips, and this year I extended that out to the club community.
No dogs were rescued in the course of this Ocoee trip.
I haven’t spent much time on the water this year. Kayaking the Haw last week I was wondering whether I could even still roll. Then I screwed up at the bottom of Moose Jaw and at least answered that question. I know the Ocoee well (and can still play back all the rapids in my head), but it’d been almost a year. Wonder how that will go? Adding to that the weather reports showed close to freezing temps in Ducktown for the weekend.
Well, my first time back on the Ocoee since knee surgery…
Well, I've been hankerin' to see just how many times I could run the Ocoee in a day, but I knew I needed one thing … shuttle. So for Labor Day weekend, my wife Marnie agreed to come along and spend a day running me/us back and forth, to see just what could be done. I’d had a few people contact me about the trip, but it all boiled down in the end to meeting Mark Kieran and Eric Tucker Saturday morning.
Well, I've written a lot of trip reports from the Ocoee, some filled with excitement and derring-do, and others that were just another weekend on the Ocoee. This is probably more the latter than the former, but it had its moments.
I've tried to run a novice trip every year on the last weekend of April. Usually late enough that it's warm, and early enough that there's still rain somewhere. In recent years we've managed warm, but usually the water was lacking, and we'd end up on the Fear at about 1.6', a level I've sworn (twice) I'd never run it again.
While I planned this trip months in advance, recent rain in the Triangle area caused a run of cancellations, and in the end it was just me, driving to Ducktown from NC, and Mark Kieran, driving up from FL.
After a lousy start leaving the house (mostly looking for my lost bicycle lock), I still managed an earlier than usual start leaving town around 4:30. Mark had left at about the same time, 12 hours earlier, and spend Friday evening playing in Hell Hole.
So there's a new whitewater park in GA, which only opened this spring…
