Cannobino Experience

                                                                           

On My Trip in Italy we were able to paddle a river called the Cannobino or appropriately renamed the "Cannobeater" as there was alot of beatings on this river, The reason we did this is because we were heading over to Switzerland but got told about this river close to the border so we decided to have a look at it. After arriving to the get on with the only information we got told was "Its a Fairly committing gorge but not to hard"

We decided to get on and paddle down, As we entered the gorge it became clear it was defiantly going to be committing as it was in a 400ft deep gorge with no way out except down river. However it did not seem to difficult sort of felt abit like Spean gorge at the start but then gradually getting steeper.

Within the first 10 minutes Russel decided to get pinned. Wasn't a major pin as he just pulled his deck and stood on the shallow river bed, but it was hard to get his boat out. Me and Dave tried pulling it out with just a throw bag on it but this wasn't enough so we had to set up a pulley system (First time I needed to do this for real).

When we recovered Russel's boat we carried on going down, the river got much worse from here, Siphons everywhere, Difficult to scout drops. However so far all the rapids seemed good to go but with potential to go wrong so we were out at ever rapid taking our time on this as we wanted to avoid any more incidents.

As we got about halfway down we approached a rapid which turned a sharp 90 degree corner just after it. Mark got out to scout it but there was no way you could see round the corner or no way in stopping after this rapid. As it was in a 400ft gorge the only thing we could do is to run it, Dave went first and did the rapid fine, Then Me. I did it fine however as soon as i could see round the corner i could see Dave getting recirculated in the eddy to the left.

I paddled hard at it, missed the line and went don't the center of the slot paddled hard and got out of it.
Russel was coming next, Dave got out ok. I paddled over to the side ready to jump out in case Russel got stuck. I see him come round the corner and gets his line on the drop, As he came of it he got back looped in the hole... I will let you see what happens next on the video he made here;

We were hoping this river was going to end soon as we were not sure how much longer it would take to get down, further down there became a section which was to narrow to actually paddle down. This was going to be one of the most difficult portages i had to do, carrying our boats over huge boulders and across a rock face. Eventually we got all the boats across and could see the end of the gorge in the distance.

We paddled the last small 5ft ledge drop and then there was the end of the gorge, just cleared out and we were all glad to be out of this safe. This was an amazing river but was scary without anyone who had done it before or no information. I would like to do this river again sometime as I will know what to expect.