Lipno festival is the biggest kayak event in Czech republic. This small calm area became for one weekend a year overcrowded by kayakers and rafters from all around the europe. Lipno is small creek witch flows trough national park. There is not enough water for kayaking but once a year at the end of summer they release water form dam and this small creek became a wild river. You can find there many rapids, holes and jumps. Mostly it is class 3plus-4 but there is also one class 5 rapid. This river is very nice and not much dangerous while you sit in kayak. As soon as you are up side down or you swim out from your kayak it start to be quite dangerous because of many rocks under surface. The most known rapids are čerťáky, škvíra and vrata. We portage škvíra because it is very narrow place where it is easy to scrape hands or hit head or do something more serious. This river has quite big gradient so there are not many eddys. It flows fast so you can run it more times a day because it is not long. From top it takes about 45min-1hour to get down. You can run river just for fun with your friends or you can compete in various competitions such as extrem race, rafting, slalom or down river race. But you need to be very careful because same time as you are on the water there are hundreds of paddlers with you. It make it way more dangerous but as same point way more safety because if something happen every one is keen to help. This year wasn’t an exception and there were some accidents. Fortunately nothing serious happened just some dislocated shoulders, scratches and some swimmers. It was my first time there and I enjoyed it so much. I met there many good friend, who I could paddle with and of course party! I am realy looking forward to go there next year.
Peter starting kayak cross from the ramp
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See you Nina.
