Bottom hole at rapid 9 Photo courtesy of Eric Jackson

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I had been getting lots of requests for both a basics and an advanced playboating video since my book came out three years ago. I finally got a month freed up to go somewhere warm with great playboating water and got some great friends together to film the videos. Chris Emerick, Jay Kincaid, Jessie Stone, Clay Wright, and myself left for Africa on New Year’s eve and spent one month filming on the Zambezi and the Nile Rivers. Here is what happened.

I spent New Year’s eve flying from Atlanta to South Africa on South African airlines. It is a 19 hour non-stop flight. Not bad actually. I met Chris at the Johannesburg airport that next day and we spent the night in a hostel called the Ritz (not as fancy as the name suggests) The next day we took a flight from Johannesburg to Livingstone, Zambia, home of Victoria Falls. Jay, Clay, and Jessie rolled in over the next couple of days as I worked some deals with the Zambezi Sun hotel right at the put-in for the five of us to stay for 12 days. What a sweet spot!

"...Clay broke his paddle in the middle of the last hole (about 15 feet high) and his nose on the last day."

The hotel is right at Victoria Falls, literally. We could go out early and swim above the falls, right on the lip. There were several nice swimming spots that weren’t too scary. There is a rainbow made from the mist of the falls that will blow your mind. It starts high above the falls and slowly drops down into the gorge as the sun rises. The entire Zambezi River flows over the lip of the falls into a crack in the earth. The spray from the falls shoots into the far side of the river and creates a waterfall that goes upwards from the strong winds. Below these falls is where the rapids of the Zambezi Gorge start. They have been heavily over rated in difficulty over the years. If you have ever watched Steve Fisher’s Wicked Liquid you would be right to be afraid. The reality is, however, that the river can be run as a solid class IV with a couple of class V’s that can be walked. It isn’t any harder than the Futalafu in Chile.

Our days were taken up by the river. We would wake at 6:30 and eat breakfast at the hotel, then get our gear ready and plan the shuttles. By 8am we would be at the top of the gorge where our porters would take our gear down to the river. By 8:30 we were dressed and on the water.

There was way more playspots than we had time to really play. The heat took some getting used to. We spent lots of time upside down cooling off. I started by wearing a spray skirt and paddle jacket but found that I was cooler in my shorty drydeck

The hardest rapids were 7 and 9. Chris and I ran the river the first day alone before the others arrived and Chris almost got sucked into the big hole on river left in 9. He decided to leave that rapid alone for a while. Clay, Jay, and I started going down the middle of 9 with the water getting significantly higher each day.

On the last two days Clay broke his paddle in the middle of the last hole (about 15 feet high) and his nose on the last day (he still has to get it straightened). Rapid number 7 was getting harder and Jessie was getting a little worried about Pattella’s Gap ( a nasty gap on the bottom right of the rapid, where the water goes, of course) She did fine though.