Part II: the No Way rapid

Another famous or infamous rapid is called “No Way.” There is no way not to talk about “No Way” when people mention the upper gorge. The name suits the rapid: not only because there is no way you can remain dry, but also the deployed boulders in this rapid make it seem like there is no way through. Sometimes after passing through this section, we had to scan the river carefully to look for derelict paddles because plenty of people swam in this section for various reasons. You cannot wing it even if you want to, because No Way is the first rapid after the Lunch Rock which is a hard-to-ignore landmark therefore your nerves know exactly when to armor up.

I was alert every time I did No Way, and the route I selected for this time never repeated the previous ones. When a rock appeared, sometimes I wanted to go around from the left, and sometimes I wanted to backward paddle and go to another side of the river so that I could totally avoid the rock. My body had to execute the commands given by my mind in a super fast motion – as if the body and mind were an item – because there was no time for a blink of hesitation, or I would be the next one who needed a rescue.

Every leader reminds their participants to raise their shields when the upcoming rapid is No Way. The funniest thing to me is that the more details the leader describes about the rapid, the more tensed up my muscles are. This season, on one of the dam release weekends, I paddled the upper on both Saturday and Sunday. On Saturday, the leader said, “the next rapid is the most difficult rapid in this section, blah blah…” The flowing sound of the river swallowed the leader’s words, and his last piece of reminder was the only thing I could capture, “please keep enough distance between you and your fellow boaters.” I waited, respecting the reminder, and nothing happened to me. I even didn’t know that was No Way until we had to rescue one fellow paddler and that was my first time on the upper this season.

The next day, Sunday, I ran the upper again with a different leader. She spent quite amount of time explaining the safety tips and the potential risks we had to take for No Way. That got me very nervous, my abundant imagination haunted me and I could not tell whether my wet palms were caused by sweat or river water. I drove my boat into the first wave and it looked like a giant. My boat was shaken vigorously, and that trembling force transferred to my muscles and soon shocked my brain. “What am I doing?” “Didn’t you run this section less than 24 hours ago?” I laughed myself, and relaxed. My muscles loosened up, and I drifted down with several maneuvers.

The fifth time I did the upper, a friend I made from the trip, Mitch, approached me while we were having snacks on the lunch rock. He advised me, “If you want to get better, you know what you should do? Try to do eddy hopping in No Way.” Eddy hopping is a useful strategy, especially when you are paddling an unfamiliar waterway in which it happens that you require more time to evaluate and plan a river strategy for the unknown. At times, people have to get out of their boats and walk along the shore and hop on the rocks to scout farther when a horizontal line is the only thing seen. Therefore we need a place to stay to earn the extra time, a place to park to get out of the boats. That’s why we don’t just drift down with the river; we paddle from one eddy to another eddy and to another eddy. That’s called eddy hopping.

In No Way, there are many boulders, therefore, with the right water level, there are many eddies behind them. No Way is an excellent place to practice eddy hopping. “Huh… It’s No Way, do I really want to do that?” I was a bit concerned; tipping over in No Way would not be fun, because it would not be easy to roll in narrow passages while banging on rocks and swimming in a class 3 would definitely not be pleasant. “But… I want to get better,” I couldn’t resist the temptation. I asked Allen, my good paddling friend who is also an aggressive boater, to help guide me through eddies, because I wasn’t that confident on my river reading skills yet.

My goal was to stop at each eddy if possible. I missed a couple, but the whole process was still tiring. Boulders in No Way were usually moderate sized, and most eddies behind them were only big enough to accommodate a couple of boats, and some were even good for only one boat. I typically waited in the current eddy and repeated the whole peel out, eddy turn moves to get in the eddy Allen was in after he left. However, on that day, the river was crowded. Sometimes I had to wait longer, and sometimes I had to choose a different eddy than Allen’s to enter. If the eddy was small, the downstream current could still get my boat. I had to paddle forward to get as close as possible to the boulder in front of me to avoid drifting away.

The most scary and weird experience happened when I peeled out of an eddy while another boater was trying to eddy turn into my eddy. I was already in motion when I saw her, therefore I couldn’t decide whether I needed to back in or finish my action before she entered to avoid a crash. I didn’t stop and she started to scream, “Don’t move. Don’t move!!” Right after that, her boat crashed into my boat, and we both shifted for some distance. I almost bounced out of the eddy in the opposite direction I was heading to, and had to paddle hard to maintain my balance and regain my calm. Allen told me afterwards that in that kind of situation I should have yielded to the ones who were entering. It’s like an unofficial river traffic rule. I guess it makes sense.

I never knew that No Way could be this long. Every time I paddled the Lehigh River, even if the rapid was wilder than I expected, I knew I only had to sustain for a short time. The rapids in Lehigh are never long, and they are always followed by an extended length of calm and smooth section. With eddy hopping, No Way became twice, no, ten times longer than it was. That was my first time in No Way, panting. But I did it. Kayaking, it is so much fun.

To be continued…