Читать книгу Carolina Whitewater. A Paddler's Guide to the Western Carolinas онлайн

41 страница из 66

4. UNSPOKEN COMPETITION—Finally, there is a good deal of unspoken competition at this level of paddling. While this is not new to the sport, it has certainly had an effect on it. This one-upmanship, if you will, has a much larger ante today than it did ten years ago.

For years the terms “hard” and “easy” have been used as adjuncts in describing whitewater difficulty. We’ve all heard “easy Class V” or “hard Class IV” used as a means of further delineating differences between rapids. Largely as a result of the more extreme water being paddled nowadays, rapids graded at the Class V level have, by far, a broader range of difficulty, within and between them, than the other classes. The much more difficult Class V water of today is put in the same category as rapids that were considered extreme ten years ago. Sometimes this results in shoving the “old” Class V rapid down into a lesser category. More often, rapids with large difficulty differences are placed in the same category. With the current International Canoeing Federation (ICF) scale, this “crowding” is inevitable, and it can be very confusing. There is a need for further, and more precise, delineation in classifying rapids at the Class V level. The old “measuring stick” needs a new coat of paint, one that shows the inch, as well as the foot, markers.