2024 LCC Alpine Paddling Holiday
Day 07 Friday afternoon 26th July: Lower Durance by Nick Coughlin
Friday afternoon and it was decided we would paddle the Lower Durance or “Sunshine Run.”
After a slightly delayed start, nearly the whole group of paddlers set off down the wide, fast-flowing river from St Clement.
We paddled through lots of big bouncy wave trains putting large smiles on everyone’s faces.
Like all the rivers we have paddled this year features on the Durance have changed so in some ways it’s like a new river. New islands need to be navigated around and trees to be avoided. At one point it looked as though a forest had been uprooted and dumped on the bank.
Eventually, we rounded a bend and eddied out to prepare for the famous Rab wave. There are two channels into the Rab and we took our usual river left line but the rafters all seemed to be going river right. We all got in an eddy and waited while Keith went down the usual left of centre close to the rocky left bank route. From my viewpoint he seemed to be getting bounced around a bit more than usual. Unfortunately, he survived, got out and put up his paddle to signal for the next paddler to set off, all the while signalling furiously to go to the right. Some paddlers seemed to be able to get right easier than others with Cookie saying Poppy and Colin had the best line.
Dom was the penultimate paddler and whilst starting well right the river swept him left and over a rock on the edge. From my position, I couldn’t see what happened, but he was on the bank when I got down. Unfortunately, it was the wrong bank. After a bit of gesticulating and shouting Dom was told to go up near the wave and jump in to try and swim across. He managed to get to the centre of the river where he was thrown a line by two excellent throws from Cookie and Roy. They managed to pendulum him into the bank where his boat had been sitting. We could all see that the previous day’s throw line practice at St Clement’s was now being put to good use.
We got in our boats and headed down to Embrun without too much drama, even though the Embrun wave was different (larger with more volume in the river) and did manage to unseat one paddler.