September Chutes Ste Anne << Paddling the World

This fall has been quite a good one so far. After a great weekend at Moosefest in Old Forge New York, we have been fired up on trying to get more creeking in. Luckily for us, the Quebec City area has had lots of water so we (Joel Kowalski, Hal Monkman, Mark Lablanc, Patrick Camblin, Jeremy Cane, Blake Mahoney, Westley Etherington, Marcos Gallegos and myself) decided to make the trip to Quebec City to meet up with our good buddy François L. Tremblay and run some of the awesome rivers in the area. High on the list was the Sept Chutes Ste Anne which unfortunately were too high so we ran Sections A and B of the Neilson River and a run called the Des Isles (which was great). We had a great weekend but decided to keep a close eye on the gauge and if the levels were good head back up there the following weekend and try to run the Sept Chutes. Over the next week I kept looking on Quebec Whitewater, hoping the river would drop. It looked like it was going down about 2cms per day but it was still much higher then what the site had for recommended flows. Last time I did the Sept Chutes about 3 years ago, the river was about 18cms and it seemed a little on the low side… I thought the river would be better with more water. We were all pretty fired up about getting on the Sept Chutes even though they were above recommended flows and with Tyler Fox returning to Canada after 6 weeks in Nicaragua we (Hal Monkman, Dan Caldwell, Blake Mahoney, Tyler Fox and myself) decided to head back up to Quebec City and try to run the Sept Chutes (if the water dropped). As soon as we finished work on Friday we decided to go celebrate Tyler’s return and wait for Dan to come get us so we can start the drive East. Dan picked us up at bright and early at 4 a.m. (we got back from the bar at 3 a.m.) and we drove back to the Des Isle hoping that it would still have enough water and giving the Sept Chutes one more day to drop. We had a great run on the Des Isles and continued driving to Quebec City. On Sunday morning we headed to the Sept Chutes which now dropped to around 32cms (still well above the recommended flows) for a scout. We met the frenchies Franky and Emrick at the gates to the park at around noon. The park was closed which made it easy for us to try and get on this illegal run but meant we would have to hike our boats about 3km in and then back out. After hiking in and scouting the drops everyone except for Dan (who decided to shoot video and photos for us) decided that we would put on and get out above the last double drop which we decided not to run this time. The level was high which made for a very exciting run with 1 broken paddle, 1 broken kayak, one sprained ankle, some great lines and some not so great lines.