As summer rapidly came to an end an exchange of emails with Sandy Douglas led to a hastily made plan to head to Austria to try to catch the last of the meltwater in the Alps.
The plan was to first drive to Graz in the East of Austria via the slalom course in Augsburg where we would visit my friend Paula and subsequently to head west to the Austrian Alps.
Graz was the first stop, for some city surfing and sightseeing. There are two features created by the bridges in Graz, when we were there the top wave was working and the bottom feature was a tricky hole.
After leaving Graz we headed west to find some real white water. The first stop on our journey was Laussa falls, a nice 7 metre park and huck drop. All should have gone well until I narrowly avoided a swim after a deck implosion lead to me almost getting stuck at the bottom of the fall.
A few hours more driving later and the next day we found ourselves in the Oetz Valley.
The first river we paddled was the Lower Oetz, which was a dull easy wave train. Things improved dramatically with the Pitzbach, which we paddled with two Germans, a low volume technical run which started high up a beautiful valley. We also completed runs on the Upper Oetz, the Wolfs Gorge, anda fun bumpy run on the Upper Lanquart and the Venter Ache, though levels on rivers other than the Oetz could have used more water.
Sandy Cruising on the Pitzbach
After a few days in the Oetz valley Sandy had to leave and I made my way to Thun to watch the last weekend of the World Freestyle Championship, I managed to grab a sofa in the house of the Irish team thanks to Mark and joined in the last couple of nights of partying as well as getting to paddle the fantastic Weiss Leutschine with Julian and Mark, after doing laps of the waterfall at the top.
As the weekend ended I headed north to go home, I stopped at Bremgarten wave for a play. There I met a few of the guys from the British team and a plan emerged to make the journey to Slovenia to paddle the Soca river.
A combination of beautiful paddling, cheap wine, and sleeping by the river made for an awesome few days relaxation before the drive back home
