01-04-2013
Liamone
This must be a once in a lifetime experience, water everywhere in Corsica and nearly all rivers runnable, lots even too high...Taking a prudent approach, we opted to run the middle Liamone for starters, gentle buildup from grade II to III and a series of nice blocked rapids towards the end. Some concern at the putin as I notice that the sandy beach from which we launched last time was completely under water and we thought we already had high water then....
Once on the water, it takes some time to get used to the boats again and the power of the water is obvious, even simple rapids make for powerful lines, great stuff once you get dialed in. After some gentle cruising, the first horizon lines start to appear and after some initial scouting we quickly revert to Nirjhara style, just bomb down and see what happens.
With no place left in the eddies, Jorg opens up a particularly steep staircase, starting with a 1.5m boof and then round a big midriver boulder with no obvious way out.
It took some time before we saw his paddle waving us down, always good for some extra adrenaline. Peter also had a moment on a steep and long rapid ending in a swim after several roll attempts.
Arriving at the exit gorge, noone fancied the looks of the entry rapids and we engaged in a quite horrendous portage where I even managed to loose the right track resulting in horrendous portage * 2 and nearly making me consider to just run the entire thing.
All in, great start to the holiday. Only downside was that we got separated from some Brit paddlers that we had promised a shuttle back to their car. These guys were facing a quite beefy bike shuttle but OK, worse things can happen.
