Saturday October 2nd 2010.
Riviere St-Charles, Valleyfield, Quebec.

2010 has been an awesome year in the Seaway Valley. This year we decided to end the World Kayak series with something a bit. A Boatercross!
The weather did not do much for us but despite the cool temps  8 paddlers turned up to try the first ever boatercross in Valleyfield.
The site gets it’s water from 2 huge pipes them run under the road at the top of the river. This is a great place to Launch paddlers (2 at a time) down through the course.
The question on everyone’s mind was who will get the better start position and how was I going to decide who raced who. GThe Answe for both: Rock Paper Scissors So adult like

The first run was awesome.  There are 3 great places for entertainment. The drop at the start brings the boaters close together. Manic offers a bit of a challenge and we ran everyone through our local keeper hole where we were blessed with a few good shows of “oh no… I am stuck…”. Not big carnage but just enough to keep it interesting for the newer kids

Click here to view the embedded video.

Each race brought up closer and closer sorting out the paddlers into an A and a B class.In the end the results were as follows:

A Class:
1st place went to Sean Hakvoort
2nd went to Zachary Hakvoort
3rd place weent to Sebastien
4th went to Cheryl McGregor

B Class

1st place was Zachary Zwanenburg
2nd place went to Sylvie Lebel
3rd place went to Aime-Jean Lavigne
4th place went to Emily Zwanenburg

The truth is, everyone won! Sylvie gained loads of confidence during the start process. Emily ran the tubes for the first time and came back to do it again . Sebastien (despite getting a boat in the face at the bottom of the start chute) came back and stepped up his game. This kid has a lot of potential and I am hoping to see him train and compete for more serious events next summer.

The Hakvoort brothers…. What can I say about my 2 favorite young giants? They are awesome. No fear, loads of enthusiasm and did I mention they are big boys? Holding them back in the start gate kept this old guys arms under stress for a long time
Aime-Jean and Zachary Z. put on a great show getting in each others way and keeping the other at arms reach till the end. Well done. Cheryl is always fun to paddle with and puts on a great effort and showing at every event I get to host. Nice This time she also gave us the best trashings in every hole she could find:) And we are always proud of her.

So, what do we do now? Plan for pool competitions and fun.

Thank you all for being part of another great summer WK Seaway Valley Season

Cheers

Robert Zwanenburg
www.cornwallwhitewater.com