White Water Canoeing in Southern France

As nine of us met at Vichy en route for the French Alps in 1984, I still did not really believe that wet suits would be needed in July in the south of France. After all, it had been a heat wave last summer when four of us had sampled the area and our previous experience of alpine canoeing had been two wet and mild weeks in Austria.

Anyway, we were warned that the French alpine rivers in June, at the height of the snowmelt, would very cold, so rather than risk an immediate ice cold dunking, we congregated at the artificial slalom course by the Allier at Vichy for some much needed practice. The water was a warm grade II (on the international scale used to rate the difficulty of navigating a stretch of river) so, after a few runs, some of us decided to swim down – the technique being to lie flat on your back fending off the concrete walls with your feet. Having survived with only minor cuts and bruises we drove on to Briancon where the municipal campsite provided us with a base in the Durance valley for the next two weeks.

Battling through a stopper on L’Onde