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By Jez

The Leven River is a very demanding, very committing river that starts with a 6 meter seal launch. When you drop in you are surrounded with huge 70 foot cliffs as far as you can see. While in Tasmania shooting footage for our up coming film for Skippy Films, a group of us headed over for a run and found the levels a substantially amount higher than we would have hoped for. This made for an interesting hour of, "should we?", "You think it’s runable?" and the classic "Will we live?" After all a bunch of chatting, the group dropped from 12 to about 8 and we headed down to the river.

As the track narrowed you could hear the river roaring.

After our seal launch we found the river to be a whole lot pushy than we would have liked, the first section was more like big water in Africa than Australia as surging waves and holes formed. The team scouted the first rapid and most of us decided to walk it, with good reason as the boof looked a bit sketchy and Adrian who did run it found himself going over the boof sideways as his hull got caught on the boof rock.

We eventually got to a spectacular horizon line, and the start of some awesome waterfalls. No opportunity to scout this as the massive cliffs are on either side of the waterfall. We weren’t sure what was below at this level but knew there would be some kind of recirculating hole. Since I had the camera I was forced to run the first drop and nailed the most awesome boof of my life, this always happens when no one is around to see it. Murphy’s Law. The team followed the line perfectly, nailing the boof and keeping away from the FU hole.

The next 12+ meter drop was below and we all lined up getting ready to go. Most everyone went deep, real deep and popped up some 10 seconds later way down stream. Mullet, a C1 boater got to know his kayak a little more than he would have liked, smacking his face on the front deck getting a nice bloody nose.
All in all everyone nailed the line. The usual high fives were thrown around at the end and we were stoked to have padded this amazing river at the highest level ever run.

Footage gained will be part of a new video by Skippy Films www.skippyfilms.com

Jackson Kayak Coordinator of Karma
jez

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