Baranco de Viu, Spanje

Friday 14/05: warm-up run on Esera from Seira to Campo.

The beginning was rather quiet but the lower 3km with some narrow sections provided good sport with some slight hints of funny water. The entrance to the last gorge section featured some first wide eye moments and some rodeo action by den Otter. Level campo: 45m3/sec

Being still full of energy and boating hungry, the entire crew joined for a descent of the 6km grade IV-V Barranco di Viu. Putting in at 4:30pm meant epic in the making and certainly discarded all hopes for a lengthy dinner.

The guidebook says that the river starts as a small ditch and picks up 80% of its flow 1km after the put-in.

It was our feeling that the micro-creeking lasted for much longer than 1km, feeding speculation about wrong put-in and the additional flow came in very gradually and not through a well defined tributary as we had hoped for. Unlike the bony nature in the beginning, we quickly got in the right rhythm with small subteams allowing for good progress.

Without really noticing, the microcreeking all at once transformed in excellent grade IV boulder hopping before arriving at a narrow gorge with grade VI entrance fall.

At 8:00pm, half of the crew elected to join the hiking path to the take-out while the rest settled for a quite exciting run down the remainder of the gorge. Please be warned for the rapid after the gorge that featured some swims and some very creative portage lines. After the gorge, the river boosted more fantastic grade IV boating, requiring some quick reccies and good probing. Think we arrived at 9:30pm in Campo lake and after lengthy shuttle and return to Ainsa, finally entered the resto at 11pm, long live late evening dining in Spain!