Summer Camp!

Teaching at a summer camp can be stressful. Keeping track of all your campers, staying up all night with you’re friends and waking up at 6:30am every morning, campers whining…that being said, the fact that it’s fun every waking second is pretty worthy.

Passages is a day camp in Richmond, VA. It’s where I learned to kayak and where I’ve worked for almost 10 years. Every summer I pile into a town house in down town Richmond with 10 to 20 other staff for a month or two. It’s awesome. Granted, I’m a bit on the older end of the camp councilor curve. Many people think that 23 or 24 is a good time to get a real job, but I’ll keep coming back for a long time.

Random dance parties popping up a few times a week, late night karaoke, summer flings, and midnight kayaking trips are the norm. Sleep is pretty much non-existent as well as privacy and down time.

Here are some photos from my highlights. The first two are from running the Green with the paddlers I grew up with, some of whom had been wanting to run the Green for 5 years and finally got on it this season. Also during this trip, I got to run the left side of sunshine. Sunshine is one of the “big three” on the Green. It’s got more folklore and scary stories surrounding it to give any creeker nightmares, mostly because so many people have been running the Green for soooo long. Recently people have begun running the left side of the drop, where it looks like you’d break your back on the rock and get shoved into the wall. Amazingly, if you do it right, it seemed softer than the normal line.


Trip Jennings running Sunshine
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Trip Jennings running Sunshine
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Notice in the photo of Mike on Gorilla (another of the big three), that he’s paddling, not one of the shinny new Gus’s or Jefes that the staff has access to on the weekends, but a 12-foot long Corsica. Running hard rapids is one thing, but rocking them in a 12-foot long boat made over 10 years ago is rad, style points to Mike.


Mike on the Gorilla
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Next up is the Shoremaster. The floods of early July were nice enough to bring us some interesting things, new logjams, 10 inches of new sediment, and a L-shaped floating dock. So, we did the only thing a group of self-respecting boaters would…float it through the hardest rapid we could find, That happened to be the mighty Hollywood Rapids on the James River through Richmond, VA. It’s urban class III/IV whitewater right in-between skyscrapers, so it’s been run thousands of times, often by people who have no clue what their doing, and in all sorts of crafts. This is yet unconfirmed, but I’d like to venture that we got the first floating L-shaped dock descent of Hollywood Rapids.


Tackling Hollywood on the L-shaped dock
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Shoremaster on the James
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Riding Hollywood on the L-dock
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Sadly, all good things must come to an end, but as Karl said, the end of every good trip is just an invitation to plan the next one, so in that spirit, I will be heading to Mexico on Saturday the 29th to study Spanish in Queretaro. Stay tuned for updates from paddling with Eleanor Perry in Mex.

Peace,
Trip