Reno River Fest

By Dane Jackson

This weekend was the and it was a blast liike always. The levels were super high the weekend before the event. It was 420 cfs on Friday and on Saturday in the morning it was 2000+ cfs. So it stayed good levels for number 3 throught the week, and then for the festival It wound up gettting slightly low but it was still a great level. When I was training I was pretty happy I was hitting my moves consistintly. Also there were a lot of combo moves going on in training and in the compitition. People were doing Blunt+Mcnasty, Back Blunt+Phonics Monkey, Splitwheel+Phonics Monkey, Lunar Orbit+Tricky Woo etc. etc. I was hitting my Back Loop+Mcnasty every time and over the top in practice, but as the levels got lower It became harder for me to stick them. But while I was practicing I got all the moves that I wanted to be getting and I got a nice routine set up. Entry Move, Loop, Space Godzilla Left, Space Godzilla Right, Right Mcnasty, Left Mcnasty, Lunar Orbit Right, Tricky Woo Right, Phonics Monkey Right, Phonics Monkey Left, Tricky Woo left = 1600 points. Well that is my routine, I never got completely to the end, the best score I got was 1300, but I was still super pysched about it. I had the third best score in the whole compitition, Andrew Holcombe got 1440, and Stephen Wright got 1500+. I was pretty happy to find out that I would have made it to mens finals if I competed in mens. I wound up winning Juniors with Jason craig in second, and Seth Stoener in third. Those guys did great, it was a great finals, also all the other juniors did really great. For the boatercross I got to semi finals but then I had a bad start in the semis so I wound up not making it but I was still happy, it was fun. The top 3 were: 1st was Kyle Hull, 2nd was Stephen Forster, and 3rd was Jason Craig. Good job guys. And the final part was the first time ever Dynamic Duo Race, it was Jason and I in the Duo together. We went super fast in prelims, I plan was simply to paddle as hard as we could the whole way, and it worked. We made it to finals, in finals it was a crazy race, the duo race was boatercross with twice the amount of paddle blades flying. The finals consisted of Jason and I, EJ and Nikki Kelly, and Emily Troutman (fomer jackson) and Nick Troutman, It was intense but it was a blast. Jason and I didn’t do as good as prelims in finals but we still were happy with a bronze medal. In 1st was EJ and Nikki, 2nd was Nick and Emily, and 3rd was Jason and I. Well that wraps up my fun time in ival. Thanks to Jim Litchfield and everyone for putting on such an awesome event for the 6th time. Thanks for reading my update and see you on the river,

Dane