Day-Two Section & Local Paddlers

If you´re staying at Hairy Lemon, after a few days of surfing Nile Special, the best option to relax your surf-muscles is to go for a Second-Day-Run on the Nile. My favorite "rapid" on that strech is Kalagala. Unfortunately I don´t have any stills of it while paddling it but some footage of that drop will follow in the video-clip.

Besides some really beautiful whitewater the first day section as well got some nice play, i.e. even for a beginner you got the nice wave/hole, called "superhole" at the beginning of that stretch. Superhole is a really friendly feature, as Maria went there as well to do her first tries at surfing a wave and was super stoked afterwards. Before she went she just wanted to have a go at learing the handroll, after seeing some paddlers doing the handroll at Nile Special. Well, what can I say, she probably learnt it faster then myself, just after around one and a half hour pool session at the Hairy Lemon compound she nailed it down. The pool at Hairy Lemon, normally used for playing water-volleyball, is ideal for eskimo-roll sessions.

Here happily relaxing with Freya in the big eddy besides superhole after her first few goes at surfing a wave (surf-footage will follow).

photo by Tom Blunston

After paddling you "easily find" eager kids who are willingly carrying your boat back to the car for a few cent or let´s rather say you can´t resist their wish to do this work for you.

Something what is really amazing is the eagerness of the local kayakers to paddle full on and learn new moves . We met locals quite a few times at Nile Special and of course most of them paddle Fluid Kayaks ;-)