River: Rocky (Cape Fear River Basin)

Section: Pittsboro-Goldston Road (Chatham County 1010) to Chatham Church Road (Chatham County 1953)

Length: 4.4 miles

Paddlers: Paul Ferguson, OC-1; Bob Brueckner, K-1

Date: Dec. 18, 2018

Level: About 200 cfs when you add USGS gauges at Tick Creek (113 cfs) and Siler City (20.7 cfs) to several perennial and intermittent creeks

 

By Bob Brueckner

What a difference a dam can make, or rather the lack of one.

Nice day on the water among CCC friends and we may have even seen the birth of another addict to the sport.

We had 1 novice, couple intermediates, and some advanced paddlers along with a couple instructors and an instructor educator.  Hmm, great opportunity for some newer paddlers.  Decent weather and good conditions for a better than average wave shape for surfing (pool level around 19.3' with flow of 2600cfs).

In all of my years of paddling, I've never run the Dan through Kibler Valley.  I'm not sure why I haven't ever made this trip before.  The river is a scenic, narrow, scrapy but fun run at a 7000KW release from the Power House.  For my 1st D I had assembled a crew of Donna Murphy, Greg Murphy, and Rick Higgins along with a crew from the Smith River Valley paddlers.  Rick and I met at the REI in Durham and made the trip up to Kibler to meet up with Donna and Greg.  We ran two laps with Greg and Donna showing me some fun moves up and down the river.

Lee Martin and Lara met me at the put in for the first lap. There might have been six boaters in front of us when Lee and I put on Saturday morning. It was a fun lap. I think Lee had a quick flip and roll but otherwise a dry hair run with no sneaks. The afternoon lap was spent helping POC recover swimmers and gear. Sunday temps dropped and reduced the number of boaters. The morning lap was quite chilly for spring.

Chapel Hill Roll Session January 27th

In the spirit of Trip Reports gone by.

There were around 15 boats. 2 really long kayaks. One 2 man kayak with a woman. 4 playboat kayaks. 1 ruined kayak. 2 creek boat kayaks. 4 river runner kayaks. Some of them were blue. Some of them were red. Some of them were green. One of them had blue, green, yellow, red, fade, orange, black and white. One of them was orange. Several had several colors.

There were a lot of kayaks upside down at one time or another.

The end.

JMB