Bedford River Festival

Photo: James Reeves/Kate 

Just before I went out to Europe I, along with 300,000 other people, attended the Bedford River Festival. This was a huge event -  a big river-side festival held in Bedford (hence the name!) with fairground rides, food stands, numerous stages with various bands playing and a number of different sporting demonstrations/come-and-try it sessions.

A few of us from the UK Freestyle team were a 'sporting demonstration' in the majorsporty Watersports Arena. Every couple of hours James Reeves would get on the mic and tell the crowds (and there were a lot of them curious to see what we were doing) how we could roll, bow stall, stern stall leading to cartwheels etc etc. So, we would make like performing monkeys and do all the tricks on demand to all of the spectators.  James would then do a routine in his squirt boat followed by the boys saying they could do better than that and do some flatwater loops. Stu would pull out his speciality: a flatwater McNasty. Which even to the unintiated was pretty impressive!

But what the crowds really wanted to see was what happened when we threw ourselves down the 4m-high, very steep ramp 

(if you can, have a look at James R's facebook photos: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=44266&id=617686556).

Photo: James Reeves/Kate

My 'role' was to be the first one down in each demonstration to show the speed and 'ollie' you could get when going straight off the ramp (pretty fast) - this was mainly because I was too scared to do anything else off the end of the ramp so I was there to make the guys look good:) It was steep and high, which is not good for someone who doesn't like falling off steep high things.

Me, about to land flat - ouch! 

Photo: James Reeves/Kate

The over-energetic juniors were mad for it though - Stu Parry and Joe Bradley spent all day running up the slightly dubious ladder, winching their boats up and flying off the end in all manner of super-fast airscrews, huge pan ams and very painful-looking face plants.

By the end of Sunday I was beginning to get a little braver and landing flat was beginning to hurt quite a lot (I think I have lost a couple of inches in height) and winded me everytime, so I started trying some different stuff, which was really hard as you couldn't use the paddle to push off. 

Gradually getting more vertical 

Photo: James Reeves/Kate 

I noticed that it looked much easier throwing things without paddles so I gave that a go and eventually managed to pull off a few pan ams - hooray! The ramp (and the commentary on the mic explaining what we were doing!) was probably the best freestyle demonstration you could have without whitewater - actually, the ramp probably had greater attraction to onlookers than whitewater as they could immediately relate it to other 'anti-gravity' sports and realise what was going on (anything going over vert = good and worth a cheer; anything landing on the face = bad/painful and worth a bigger cheer!).

There were lots of other aspects of canoe-sports being demonstrated (slalom, kids paddling-games, canoe polo, stand-up surfing) and then there were come-and-try-it sessions run by the local 'Vikings' Canoe club which all in all provided a great showcase for canoeing in Great Britain. This was a fantastic publicity event for paddle-sports in general and hopefully there will be more like this at other events across the country.

Thanks to James & Kate for the photos.