High Water at Amicalola

Emma-Claire finally was sleeping on Thursday and Deidre told me to leave the house for a while and let her sleep. Knowing that it had been raining like cats and dogs, I took the short trip over to Amicalola Creek. Looking at the online gauge it looked like it topped out early that morning around 1.7 (pretty respectable). I knew at that level the playspot above the bridge would have some great waves to surf behind the main hydraulic. Below are some pictures from earlier in the summer at about the same level. The first one is me surfing in the hydraulic. Above about 1.3 the cant eddy into it... you have to start above the rapid and run it backwards and catch the surf on the fly (very worth it) because the eddy that would give service to this feature gets pushed downstream. The other picture is actually the better reason to go there when it hits above 1.5 on the online gauge. There are two to three beautiful glassy waves with perfect troughs that develop behind the main hole. And the eddy that usually feeds the main hole gives PERFECT accessibility to these waves. These waves, to varying degrees, are unbelievable surfing up to about 2.5???































On the trip with my brother-in-law Chris, we decided that if rain was consistent and this watershed could actually hold onto some water instead of spiking like it does in this drought, this could be one of the best playspots in North Georgia. I mean these are actual WAVES and not just surging hydraulics... and I had always rather surf something glassy than foamy. Let's see what weather patterns do over the next few years and we'll see if we could be right.



































I really had some fun surfing on Thursday! The other thing that was really fun on Thursday was paddling down to "Edge of the World". Between 1.2 (maybe) and 2.???? this double drop, (or triple drop, depending on how you count) is class IV. The highest I've run it was maybe 1.3. So I wanted to check it out and see what was going on.

I was BLOWN AWAY when I paddled past the bridge gauge though. When I put on a couple of hours earlier, it read 1.7. Now the river had flashed to 2.3 in just an hour and a half! I quickly did a little math in my head:

Creek Boat = at home in my garage
smaller playboat that surfs awesome, but has issues in bigger water = under me
Edge of the World at 2.3 = if ran today with no paddling partners, would likely eat my lunch!

I still wanted to check it out at this level and decide when I got down there though. So I headed downstream. Here are some pictures of "Edge" at about 1.8-2.0 to give you some perspective.
This picture above shows the classic line for the first drop.





















What I usually do is drop in clean headed river left over the pourover in the left of the picture. Your goal is to hit the far river left eddy right above this undercut (wow that's a little scary, going under there couldn't be fun). Now take a look below at the boat breaker rock covered up with water....




















This is right below the undercut rock. You can see the bottom of the undercut in the upper right of the picture above. So from the river left eddy you need to ferry from river left, above the undercut, above the boat breaker drop, all the way river right to...

...the last drop (that I don't have a picture of). It is to the far river right of what you see above. At normal levels it's a beautiful 4 foot drop over a rock shelf. At 2-2.3 it is what made me walk away without running it on Thursday. The hydraulic that it was creating was MASSIVE. It was literally pulling water back into itself from a good 7-9 feet away from the drop. I couldn't see the far right side of the drop, but I thought that if it looked anywhere as mean as this side of the drop, I'd have some work to do to claw my way out if i got stuck in there. Again, playboat.... big hole... not happening. I kept telling myself that if I had my creekboat... or if I had some reliable partners for some safety... or if... if... if... Maybe when it rains again, we'll see.

Dennis