words from Corran Addison :
Long time friend Dan Gavere contacted the team at Imagine and told them to come out to the Teva Mountain Games where the SUP class was to be featured for the second year. So Adam Cumming and Corran Addison piled into the Imagine van and drove the 14hrs to the event. The day before the event, the were joined by paddlers Dan Gavere, Nikki Gregg, Dane Jackson for a run down the course as a warm up.
The next day was the 5 mile class 1-2 whitewater sprint, which Dan won ahead of local favorite Charlie McArthur. Corran placed an impressive 5th in his prototype of the plastic Speeder, beating out 60 other racers including a whole host of Hawaiian racers including Anthony Vela and Slater Trout.
“At 10 000ft you have no air,” Corran said. “100m from the start I was out of breath and was already going lactic. But it was an awesome race and I enjoyed every agonizing second of it”
Nikki Kelly took second on the same board in the womans class, SUP paddling for only the second time in her life. “I felt like I couldn’t get any real pull because I was so unused to the stability, so I concentrated on having clean lines,” Nikki said after it was announced that she was second.
The next day, Adam Cumming and Donnie Donohue entered the SUP Cross. Adam barely edged out Donnie, moving onto the quarter finals. Using the Rapidfire which is only 9’9″ up against 12’6″ boards, he consistently moved on from heat to heat, using the Rapidfires superior maneuverability and stability to take more daring lines through the course, ultimately placing second behind Hawaii’s Noah Yap, beating local favorites Charlie McArthur and Ken Hovie.
“I’d let all the other paddlers take off in this fighting chaos, and just hang back, waiting for them to make mistakes in the crux of the rapid, and then just zoom past them,” Adam smiled when asked how he’d done it. “It was so easy to make the lines on this board that there was no sense trying to fight them in the flatwater sprint above the rapid.”
It is interesting to note that in its second year, the SUP events had more entrants than the kayak division.
