Baranca Grande
Trip Start
Aug 18, 2008
1
16
22
Trip End
Nov 27, 2008
Baranca Grande - Rio Antigua,
Mexico
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
With such a small group, we were able to have one instructor per four students and, as we were all girls, felt no competition or issues with strength or confidence between me and the other students: I felt like I was able to be myself.
We started on the Baranca Grande with Mel and Jim guiding the two rafts, then they switched and let us take turns to guide after the technical first section. This was kind of exciting and, after switching, both rafts managed to wrap on large rocks. Ours was unwrapped by us with no help from the other crew (phew....now we don`t owe "jugs" to them) wheras we needed to set up a z-drag to unwrap theirs (they owe us :)....). It was cool to see the SRT in action on the river, especially in such a remote location where help was not readily available.
Today we had another drama whern one of the raft tubes popped on a rock. Thankfully, this was not the end of the world as raft outer tubes are divided into several sections so that if one pops the rest stay inflated. Jim used the sat phone to get a new raft sent down to a known access point but Karine had to continue to guide the raft with the popped tube (cammed up to the back of the raft so that it didn`t let in water) down the next set of rapids. The comment of the day came from Jim who said "We have discovered that you can`t backferry if you have no back of a boat." Again, this was a fabulous real-life training scenario which, whilst not ideal, gave us the opportunity to see what to do when things go wrong.
I`m going to end my wentry now asit`s almost 8pm and we are meeting on the bridge for beers.
Big smiles!
