NAWF 2007- Third Time is the Charm. By Jeremy Adkins

picture by Brandon Arnold

After 365 days of hard work and preparation, the time had finally come for the 2007 North Alabama Whitewater Festival. (NAWFest.net) People came to Alabama, now so affectionately renamed as The Land of Drought, from all around to support the much anticipated event. There were 80 competitors combined for both days with four Canadians and a Costa Rican in the mix. Although water levels were a bit below what we had hoped, our sponsors, Surface Dynamics (Surfacedynamics.org), Alabama Small Boats (Alsmallboats.com), and Yell’s Hardwood Floors helped make this particular year an amazing one. Our mission, as always, has been to provide a great festival environment centered on non kayakers with kayaking as the featured sport, something that seemed to have sparked interest in even more attendees this year. King’s Bend set the stage once again, a perfect location thanks to the hard work and dedication of landowner, Pat King. Pat put countless hours into providing everyone with a comfortable and enjoyable experience. With freshly dug up ground, saw dust, hay, fire barrels, trash cans and more firewood than we knew what to do with, most of the bases were covered. Set up for the festival commenced at the beginning of the week with Keith Yell and his crew building Mt: Chaos, a 55 ft. high kicker ramp alongside its little brother Skip, a 40 ft. high skip ramp with rollers provided by Surface Dynamics to increase speed while aiding in the ability to skip off the water like a skipping stone. With everything in place, Friday kicked off with the Alabama Small Boats Huckfest and the Surface Dynamics Boatercross. At the Huckfest, a freestyle event off 20 foot Short Creek Falls, the objective was for each competitor to throw the most creative freestyle trick off the waterfall while maintaining control. Preliminaries were quite impressive; some great moves were thrown including Nathan Silsbee’s ph, Charlie Mix’s answer (the bow pencil into front flip), Boyd Ruppelt and Jeremy Adkins’ huge kickflips, Keith Yells’ rockspin 2 kickflip combo and Eli Herbert’s 13 foot canoe freewheel. The scores were based on each competitor’s top three rides and with only six people going into finals, competitors had two rides but with only one counting. Go big or go home! It was during finals that Keith executed a sweet rockspin with a paddle twirl into a 540 degree kickflip landing on his head. The winner would be Spencer Cooke with a rockspin to cartwheel freewheel which came as no surprise because while dropping off the waterfall, he switched the freewheel against the grain, reversing all momentum gained by the rockspin. However, the highlight of the Huckfest turned out to be this random kid in a Dagger boat who attempted the front flip off the shallow side resulting in his third swim of the afternoon. Maybe he should have gotten a new skirt! HHMM! With the end of the Huckfest came the beginning of Boatercross. In this event, each of us were in heats of four going around a buoy, off the waterfall, around the Red Bull buoy, underneath the waterfall and then back to the rock where the judges were sitting. In preliminaries I was ahead of Charlie Mix but was passed underneath the waterfall as I unfortunately paddled onto a pile of hidden rocks. Todd Baker would have come in first; however, a restart was called due to the Red Bull buoy moving around in the eddy with all the garbage and logs. On the restart Todd was in first again but went the wrong way around the buoy proving to be one of the most entertaining moves of the day. Way to go Todd. Doh! In the end Spencer Cooke would again be victorious. That night the competition site became a party fully stocked with refreshments, Full Moon BBQ, jousting, food vendors, kayaking videos and musical entertainment from Cool Beans, a local Birmingham jam band. Mikey Shales projected all the footage from earlier that day onto the side of the Yell’s Hardwood Floors van to share Friday’s events for those who were unable to attend. My highlight for Friday night would have to be a duet of Ice Ice Baby sung by John Reynolds and myself on the karaoke machine provided by the Riot Booth. It was a perfect end to the first day of NAWF and I could not wait until Saturday.

Saturday would be the larger of the two days and a big change this year was the freestyle event would be on site. Breakfast buffet would be served at Covered Bridge Grill with 20% discount cards going to all competitors and volunteers. King’s Hole is a great feature but the water was very low making it a shallow retentative hole. It being spectator friendly let everyone that did not know much about the sport able to watch and see what our great sport is about. In the morning David Livingston and volunteers spent two hours putting plywood on the sides of the river to channel more water into the hole making it deeper and more consistent. Mikey Shales videography would be on the cataraft suspended right above the hole which was a great view besides the sometimes bad lighting. While in the hole if you were in the hole out of turn or after your ride was over the judges would shoot you with an aerosoft gun. Thanks Cumnock! Welcome to the Dirty Dirty! In the women’s class local river supporter for over 15 years Jennifer Taylor came out in an open canoe to help the women’s class make. Also in the women’s class was eleven year old Lauren Burress. We hope to have more women next year. In the men’s class some great rides were being thrown but not consistent due to the shallow water. Brian Kirk (not to be confused with Bryan Kirk) had a great Phonics Monkey in preliminaries but was overshadowed by the youngster Todd Baker in finals. T-ODD Baker had an unbelievable ride in finals seeing as what the water level was. He stuck both phonics monkeys and a tricky whu to hands down win the freestyle event. After finals everything moved over to ramp to see who could throw some big tricks. Some great tricks were being thrown but my ramp highlight would have to wait until Sunday. Dinner would be served by Brandon and Tara Arnold and Eddy and Susan Adkins. With 125 lbs. of chicken and pasta and potato salad donated by Ruby Tuesday’s no one would be hungry. After dinner there would be more games, awards, silent auction, raffle, karaoke, fire pits, more food, funnel cakes, crazy jousting, tons of refreshments, free Milo’s sweet tea, videos, and musical entertainment provided by Ted Tedder and Steel String Theory (http://www.steelstringtheory.com/) When awards were announced Todd Baker won the overall for men’s pro. He was given a picture of Charlie Mix and it got autographed by Charlie Mix. That night the party got crunk and so did the wrestling competition between Charlie and Todd grew with Todd slamming Charlie into the ground. There were fighting for much more than pride. Her name was Rachel lol…..The jousting would be a huge hit as many people wanted to beat the crap out of each other. It would also host two of my biggest highlights from the entire weekend. One was a good friend of mine getting sick when she was bouncing around. As she came off the jousting arena the puke was actually coming out between her fingers. Number two would be watching a grown man get hit in the face and start crying like a two year old school girl. As Steel String Theory kept on jamming and the refreshments kept on flowing people starting doing back flips off the ramp onto the inflatable jousting ring. As the party winded down it was great to hear of Mark Travis getting formed tackled in a tent and someone putting shit under his hammock because he was big enough to hang into it. Great SNOT! After a great night sleep I would wake up to the sound of running water of the racing course at King’s Bend.
Sunday would hold some of the funniest things of the weekend. I first learn a friend of mine from work lock himself into his own tent. I am not going to mention any names (JJ). I decided to take all the kids kayaking due to no one showing up for the Shane Hulsey Memorial Paddle. Little Joshua was so excited he could not contain himself while I was paddling. He actually got sad at the thought of getting out of the Wavesport boat just as I do. Amazing for a kid that is scared of the water but after it was all said and done it is all he talks about. While taking the kids paddling I saw my ramp highlight of the weekend, my friend Chad Dempsey riding a bike off Mt. Chaos. His first attempt he went over the front of the handle bars and had a huge gash in his but. On his second attempt he got all the way to the bottom and ate crap right before the transition resulting in a broken ankle and toe. All in all it was a great event and I could not be more excited on how everything went. I want to thank all the sponsors for helping us put on this great festival and the volunteers that worked so hard to make it possible including the ones that did not even get a thank you. The final results should be posted at Nawfest.net along with numerous pictures. Hope to you on the river soon.

Jeremy Adkins(Team Bio)
Team SR

Pictures from Fred Huey