Paddy's Summertime Adventures, Part 2: Norway

Slightly delayed update after a busy month starting back in college. For this blog update I’m mostly going to write about Norway as this was the summer’s highlight for me.

During the second week in July myself and little Laura hit Norway for a stay of five weeks. Our first stop was the Sjoa River festival for a little bit of racing and a lot of partying! The festival consists of two main events the Ula Extreme Race and the Sweet Rumble. During the festival around 60 top boaters from all over Europe battled it out for some big cash prizes.
The qualifying round for the Sweet Rumble was up first, this was run in order to get the numbers down for the final heats. Here the top 32 including Sean Mac T, Eimear and myself managed to qualify for the final race. Next up came the Ula extreme race. This was a very cool time trial race run over about a 300metre course which finished in a crux move on the final 4 metre drop pictured below.

Here, competitors times were recorded when their kayak was flat on the water at the bottom of the drop. So if you have to roll it add’s on quite a few seconds to your time. During this race I ran as hard as I could however when landing my boof I landed too much on edge and had to brace adding some vital seconds onto my score. I finished 3 seconds off the pace to qualify and into 25th place. Eimear O’ Donnell finished the race strong in 4rd place overall.

Soon after came the world famous Pimp’s n Hoe’s party, as you can see the Irish team made a strong appearance at this event-

The weekend ended with the finals of the Sweet Rumble a head to head boater cross style battle. The race contained many close encounters with some reasonably large sized holes and a tricky finish line, consisting of a throw bag touch on a boof move. This resulted in many unexpected finishes where anything was possible. Here Sean finished in 37th, Eimear a high placed 3rd position and myself in 14th.

During the next month we progressively toured northwards following water levels and paddling in a bunch of different areas these included; Sjoa, Otta, Oppdal and some others I can't remember how to spell. There is paddling for all abilities In Norway but the highlights are definitely the endless amounts of grade 4-5+ creeks covering this wild country. Therefore paddlers with a strong roll that enjoy grade 4+ white water will thrive here. After paddling different creeks nearly every day for 5 weeks we had barely made an impact on the paddling here. Some of the classics included:

The lower Rauma

The Upper Rauma

And the uber clean Ula slides

A couple of travel tips for Norway

• Essentials Include: The Norwegian whitewater guidebook, this is the bible when paddling in Norway. It contains a varied guide of many of the different paddling areas and a bunch of different grades from 2 to as high as you want to go.

• A good tent, tarp and rain coat as it will rain when you are there and these summer showers can sometimes last for weeks.
  

• Time of year to travel: From Springtime there is paddling to be done in Norway until the late summer, however water levels vary in different areas during the summer. Generally the more southern areas like Voss work in the early summer and the Northern areas in the late summer.

• It is definitely true that this is an expensive country to travel in, in comparison to Ireland. However your journey can be made cheaper if you happen to be travelling from mainland Europe. Laura and I bought most of our staples for the 5 week trip in a €200 euro shop in France. All that was left was meat, dairy and veg. The cheapest local supermarket for this stuff is the Kiwi.

Pictured here is our paddling buddy Brian illustrating one of the many dangers of running waterfalls, after a close call landing a bit too flat.

Coming up next are some gear reviews and a video of the trip!