I learned to paddle in the southeast and there was an amazing place to practice boofing: Alien Boof on the Ocoee.

What are some of the best spots to practice boofing around Seattle? Are there any great boofs with nice short portages back above the drop to run it again and again?

Cheers and thanks!

Ian

Real tough to catch, but South Fork Snoqualmie (Fall in the Wall section) has some great boofs and it is a short run - it comes up in the fall with a good stretch of rain at Snoqualmie Pass.  I bet even when the bottom drops out you might still catch enough flow in a few drops to make it ok.

Yeah FITWah, a.k.a. Fall In The Wall, puts your boof practice more into a PNW style creekin context. This is the Mini Golf of Creekin for around here. You get about a half dozen memorable boofs plus some smaller mankier ones thrown in.

This run is for the Kayaker who already had skills in a creekboat. It goes pretty straightforward, but wipe outs and swims on this very steep shallow run can hurt.

Definitely more of a snowmelt season destination for most folks.

The Sky and the Green offer the best bang for your buck if you don't mind smaller pour over style boofs. They are great for practicing your stroke timing and approach angle (charc), your landing tajectory, ect. All in a class III+/IV- setting.

If you want to dial in the PNW basalt zones, the White Salmon would be good to apply class IV skills or greater that a boater already has. You get lots of quality boofing in any of its sections, really. Several tall waterfalls to apply that boof and get all the practice you want.
And obviously once a boater has the chops, the Little White Salmon is non-stop boof practice.

From Seattle, that's a weekend well spent.
I get much of my boof practice on Robe and Icicle. Mostly boulder boofs, but good sized ones with a thick rug of current draped over it.

agree with Ellingferd on this one.  your best overall choice is to practice boofs all over off waves trying to make that boof sound on the back side, on pillow moves eddying out, on little twisty stuff that gets you getting your boat on edge and paddle reaching for the stroke.  the boof is used all the time and comes in more handy when there isnt an autoboof available. this is washington land of the water boof and ledge hole. its all about edge baby and torso unloading.

I believe one of the best places to work on your boof stroke in a fairly safe, controlled environment is the ocean.
Paddling out into the surf will require controlled paddling that contains the basic aspects of a good boof stroke: leaning forward and timing your paddle stroke to catch the water and pull yourself forward.
In addition to the fun of surfing waves, kayak surfing will also give you experience holding on while being beat down, which may come in useful when you miss your boof on the river!

       

Now THERE'S the Elephant in the Room right there! And while most paddlers (myself included) are always scrambling out of the way of this Elphant, Sam is out there Boat'n with that Fat 'ol Elephant and gettin on a first name basis wit it.

Yeah, Subbing out is an art for sure. Plus, as much Glamour and Hype that the Boof recieves as being the Holy Grail of (whitewater) Kayaking, sometimes the melt line just feels better than some scrapy boof that everyone has been culturally conditioned to hit whether the lines require it or not.

Words of wisdom, Sam. The Top Tye offers several classic "Steep Creek" style boofs though, once a paddler has mastered the boofing concept in lower gradient rapids. And Canyon Creek Lewis is exquisite.

Ocean boating will always inform one's whitewater practice, but in my opinion your time is better spent in the swiftwater environment where you can hold yourself accountable to your line, stroke timing, boof, and exit charc. I believe that your exit charc is a critical aspect of judging the precision of your boof. I think having the context of waves, rocks and holes, eddies and pillows ect is key to being able to dial in the finesse of the Entire Line leading up to and exiting the boof. It's the space/time continuum of the river, man.

Edited by jP - 12 Nov 2013 at 4:27pm

I have had my fair share of beat downs and I have put a lot of energy into improving my boof stroke. CC lewis is a playground of ledges. This is a great run with big pools after each rapid (esp lower water). A bit closer to home would be Box Drop on the Top Tye. At lower water you can lap just this rapid. It is fun, fast, and good practice. The Upper Green also has many great boof spots along the whole run.

Practicing on ledges teaches you timing, reaching, pulling your legs up, centering your body over the boat, and stroking in the whitewash. I also feel it helps with the mental game of dropping over a lip.

Lastly, get a displacement hull. Going from a small Burn to a Nomad, my confidence on a ledge improved dramatically.

And don't let Rob convince you Lunch Hole is a good place to practice :)

What about the Sauk? It seems like at 7k it has tons of boofs all over the place, though many of them are not huge .... since I am not running BD on the reg as of yet, it seems like a good place to learn to boof (though I personally don't boof ... I like to get perpendicular to the current going into the hole, blow my whistle on myself and hope for the best ... which is probably why I am not running BD much). What is this melting and subbing out of which you speak?

The Mystery Move- a controlled, intentional manuever that can only be accomplished in a squirt boat. It is a mystery to us as an observer, but the true Mystery Move is not a mystery to whoever is executing it. That, I think, is an imortant qualifier. Usually the mystery move is initiated on an eddyline or against a boil where two seams come together. Dropping a hip to edge these extremely thin boats into the water and spinning with the eddyline pulls the squirt boater completely underwater. They often dissappear entirely but sometimes a helmet and the top hand/blade is visible.

Raft guides and kayakers alike love to abuse this term because
a) it sounds cool to say, and they think it makes them sound cool
b) most of them don't really know what it means.

If a rafter falls out of the raft at Hussum Falls and does 30 seconds of downtime chunder, you might hear someone say "did you SEE that MYSTERY MOVE? That was SIIICKK!" Well, the boater may have dissappeared and had a recirculating near drowning experience, but that is completely different from a mystery move. Closer to a Meltdown, really. Mystery Moves don't occur during normal down river travel. If a person or object goes deep over a drop it subbed out or melted.

The Stern Squirt- perhaps a more commonly misused term than Mystery Move, this manuever can also only be executed in its pure form by squirt boaters in squirt boats. Playboats can perform crude approximations of the stern squirt, but most modern playboats are simply too short, stubby and puffed up in volume to really execute one.

The Stern Squirt is the gateway drug to the Mystery Move. It is usually executed leaving an eddy line, and the ascending spiral of the bow is a good indicator of whether or not you are observing a true stern squirt. The boat sprials on the eddy line and the bow climbs higher and higher into the air until it is verticle or nearly so.

Playboats in the late 90's and early 2000's could do stern squirts because they were longer and lower volume with slicy decks. This was because they were patterned after squirt boats. But boats like the EZ got away from the low volume some- they were starting to puff up the volume more around the cockpit to facillitate other manuevers and lost some of the squirtability, but the awesome boaters of the day could compensate.

If you are running your creekboat down some creek, run some big drop, have a ton of water pile up on your stern, your bow might shoot way up in the air. "Did you see that stern squirt?". No because that isn't a stern squirt. That is an ENDER. A stern Ender. Or call it a Tail Stand. An even older (now ancient and forgotten) term would be a "Pop Up" because either bow or stern "pops up".

No, stern squirts don't occur when creek boats bomb through drops. Ever. Those are Tail Stands or Enders. Stern Squirts occur intentionally when someone with a squirt boat or similarly suited boat (Slalom Boats perform great stern squirts) leaves an eddy line, drops the hip that meets the opposing current, and cranks a huge reverse sweep, thus slicing that edge in a diving motion that brings the bow verticle as the boat spins with the eddy.

Totally off topic, sorry. But I figure with new boaters taking to the sport all the time, maybe its helpful to outline some of this terminology. People spent a lot of time developing these manuevers so that we could benefit from their discoveries. I honestly think its a simple matter of respect. If we are passionate about any endeavor we should profess to know something about that endeavor. The alternative is ignorance, and that's just not necessay.

The Sauk also has some really good boofs on it, but they're more level dependent and there isn't quite the quantity that there are on the Green, MM, or Sky.

Thanks for all the definitions!

I would say the Sauk has more boofs per mile than the MM when it's at the right level, though the MM definitely has a lot of good ones ... not that I typically hit them! But none of them look quite as clean as that alien boof.

Ok, you asked for it...

So that is a term (charc) also borrowed from squirt boating, and I admit I may be bastardizing it by applying it to "surface boating" I'm not sure. Sometimes it seems like a good word to use for lack of a better one.

A Charc is a Charging Arc. This arc is often plotted across the grain of the current, such as with another oldie but goodie term "Cross Current Momentum" or similar...

In squirt boating, that "charging arc" is the combination of slicing the outside edge (the hip on the outside of your boat's turning radius) into the opposing current (such as the downstream laminar flow as you are peeling out of an eddy). And I may be butchering its meaning even here, because I am no squirt boater. Likely that arc is projected through the 3rd dimension of sub surface laminar flows. Anyway, in my bastardized application of the term as it pertains to surface boating i.e. creeking/river running, a charc would be any arc that you have plotted with your minds eye that you superimpose over the many arcs of current out there.

So all this long winded talk must find its way back on the topicof boof practice at some point right about...now:

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the concept of a "Charging Arc" can be applied to boof practice on those pour over boofs that are all over Washington's rock garden infested streams...

Imagine this example...
You just ran the Upper Green gorge, ran Paradise, and like a good student of creek boating, you brought your creekboat today. You leave the pool from Paradise and begin floating into that next rapid with that awesome little pour over boof to the left of the big boulders in the center. You know that boof is there. You know you want to hit it. But that's not enough. You don't just want to blubber over that hump haphazardly. You want to nail that boof. That means you need a few goals before you even get close. You want to hit that hump of water with enough speed to catch a little air. You want to hit that hump in more or less the exact right spot to maximize that amount of air, but you also need one more element to be conscious of. Your ANGLE. You're going to find that the best way to artificially ratchet up the dynamics of class III pour over boofs is to tap into Cross Current momentum.

So you're approaching that pour over in our example just downstream from Paradise from the R. Left bank. If you are further left a little its just a teeny bit more turbulent. Practice cutting through that as you cut a diagonal line toward your destination. Since this pour over is really no higher than 3' if that, a diagonal approach will artificially simulate a bigger drop by giving you more of a kicker to hit. Plus, since a lot of the water's energy is slowed and deflected as it pours over the rock, a diagonal angle will compensate for the tendency to get repelled by the cusion, pillow, or pressure wave coming off the upstream face of it.

So now you have a plan. A conscious approach. You apply your forward momentum (this is why paddling flatwater and the Forward Stroke is so important, so you can assert your line, plot that charc. Meanwhile what is your boat doing? Your hips are angling the hull and edging to maintain that charc and your paddle is freed up to apply forward momentum because you practice hip, knee and toe control when you paddle your flatwater, right?

So you carve more or less to your target point, ideally within an inch or two accuracy. Ok 3" is often close enough to set a standard, but once you are more than 6" off any move in a class III laboratory, you just blew your move if you are striving for class IV proficiency.

Now before you actually boof you want to be consciously dialed into what you plan to accomplish by puttin down this line. Maybe you want to land on the eddyline and keep downstream momentum. Maybe you want to eddy out behind the pourover, or hit the corner with angle so you can S-Turn through the backwash and peel out the other side ( this is a very under valued exercise gauranteed to sharpen anyone's game). Based on how you want to plot that arc may determine your exact angle, how you take that boof stroke and/or how much you edge your boat during take off and/or landing.

Practice makes perfect, or, well, close to it. I pretty much still feel like a hack most of the time, but its fun to try to be smooth and once in awhile its very rewarding when a certain maneuver unfolds effeciently. We've all had that magical efficient moment when the boat glides across the current effortlessly...

Seriously just seeking out ittle rocks and bigger boulders to boof will go a long way toward building class IV skills. Sky and Green is all ya need to get uber bomber skills. Close to seattle.

Edited by jP - 14 Nov 2013 at 1:28am

If you want some professional instruction on the subject of boofing, Wet Planet has a "Zen of Boofing" class a couple times a year.  I have taken a couple of their kayak skills clinics (not the boofing one yet) - solid instruction. 

 

http://www.wetplanetwhitewater.com/kayak-school/skill-clinics-for-paddlers/the-zen-of-boofing/

 

 

I figure with the money I blow on kayaks and gear spending $95 every so often down there for a full day of instruction, shuttle, lunch, etc is money well spent.