Hitting up Clearwater Kayak Festival

Clearwater Kayak Festival can only described as the loosest kayaking event of the year.

The Clearwater Kayak Festival is based right in the interior of British Columbia high on the continental plato. The event ran from August 5th -7th.

The Clearwater is a classic big volume run, 500 cms squeezed in to a beautiful deep canyon, wide easy class 4 lines and relatively warm water for BC.

The event kicked off on Friday evening. We paid our 60 bucks and grabbed some
chilli and beer. The event social is staged in a small ski hill close to the river.

Come Saturday morning, the down river race was due to kick off at 11, but like I said,
this event is loose. Call it 13:00 and no less than 70 kayaks were piled into a small
eddy just below the Three Fingers rapid.

It was a mass start running through “The Moshpit”, it's a class 3 violent boogie water and on down to “The Wall” rapid, where you encounter a delightful series of giant rooster tails, big holes whilst all behind a river wide green wave, which blocks all views of beyond - hence the name 😅

The race went well, only one swim. But in all honesty, it was utter carnage, I ended up running a pretty wide left interesting line to avoid the carnage of plastic boats crashing into the hole and river right eddy.

Keenan Simpson took the win in his slalom boat. First prize, a throw bag, a
spliff and a pint glass - like I said, l o o s e 😅

Following the race there were many river laps with new and old faces.

Not to mention the SUP race and beginners down river race. It was pretty cool to see sports merge in a festival style event. Not that I remember but I expect Rita Sends won everything, probably ate the
male competitors too!

Every good paddle event has to have a party, this event gets first prize for this. Hands down.

Matt the organiser killed it, putting no less than five bands on stage, starting with a warm up from good old Timmy from truckhouselife. As you can imagine, the party stomped on in to the early hours. Classic!

Truckhouselife also uploaded this sweet video delving into the event and what it entailed!

Come Sunday, it brought the loosest freestyle event ever held. Staged on Pink Mountain.
For the sake of “freestyle is dead let's call this hot-dogging, it was mostly a long
boat surf fest.

NO time limits, no rules, no points, just impress Matt enough and the trophy’s yours.

It was wild.

Yours truly took the win, with couple of nice passes down the right shoulder.

And that’s a rap.