Prep camp @Isel

This year we have decided to expand our minds. Before going to Bovec, we spend a week in the region Osttirol in Austria. I've been here already two years ago with people from my kayaking club, so when a friend from Chile told me he would be working the season there, I convinced Julia to give the rivers there a try.
To be honest, being there for work and being Chilean (sorry, but true) I didn't expect to see Seba more than once or twice, let alone being able to coordinate common laps on the river. But I was surprised: we managed to meet with Seba and his colleague Max almost every day (even though they were living 45 min away and don't have a car with a valid "Pickerl"), which was thanks to two things. First, the season was coming to an end, so their work schedule was pretty easy. Secondly, we went kayaking mostly in the evening, since different from Soca there is no time limit to be on the river and the water levels are best between 18:00 and 21:00 anyways (the river Isel is fed by the Großglockner glacier and the water takes a few hours to flow all the way to where we went paddling).
And there was another positive surprise: just getting back from a little hike, we ran into Ben, a friend we met in Slovenia, who came over from Bovec to take advantage of the better water levels here and delivering two weeks of kayak school to a couple living in Switzerland. It was a super lucky coincidence that - not being able to see him in Bovec - he ended up just in the same place as us and thus we still got to paddle with him after work and once even during one of his classes (his clients liked us, so they invited us to tag along for our last day in Ainet).
The only one missing out was Tom, a friend of Julias, who stayed with us so shortly that we didn't even take any pictures with him. He was supposed to spend most of the two weeks of our vacation with us, but left after merely two days because his girlfriend at home got sick. Julia and I are still amazed by such dedication.
Besides our laps with the guys (which allowed us to paddle the WW III section from Huben), Julia and I also did some solo laps on the section starting from our camp ground in Ainet (WW II+) and did a lot of practicing and playing in the waves. Despite her initial reluctance to take time away from Bovec, Julia was at least as happy as me to discover Isel, which is close to a big water river in the evenings and has a lot of cool features to offer.Read more