A Classic scene for any Uni club - sitting around the Beers!
After the long drive from Italy, we made it to Camp Soca greeted by some rather heavy rain... We had a slow start getting the group river permits together but we were soon out on the river and found out that the rains had made some of so called boulder gardens to be somewhat devoid of boulders. Never the less the paddling was clean and perfect for our group.
The mountains surrounding the campsite.
To begin with we spent some time on the upper stretches of the river, getting everyone (myself included) back up to scratch after a winter of minimal boating due to a disappointing lack of rain. Soon we ventured down to some of the lower sections, my favourite of these was the Altona section - a great and fairly continuous grade 3 (+) jaunt which was a perfect platform for some of our newer paddlers to test their skills.
Beans, enjoying the sunshine and skimming at the Altona take out.
To summarise the paddling, this really is a must visit place especially if you are mainly in to grade 2-4 boating and sunshine. There is a bit of everything, tight gorgey constrictions, boulder gardens and chilled gravel bed runs. It's not too hard, but if you're imaginative you can test yourself on all sorts of grinds, eddy lines and rock spins.
A spectacular waterfall on one of the Soca's tributaries - this is worth a quick work to see!
I should mention to those who plan on visiting the Soca as a Uni group or just group of paddlers who want to have a drink and a party to pick your campsite carefully; particularly if, like us you go in early June during the German holidays as the campsites get very busy and our chatter (even though it wasn't very loud) at 11pm didn't go down well. So just do a bit of research and you'll find somewhere more open to larger, louder groups...
Water doesn't get much more blue than on the Soca!
And Finally here is a nice video summary of our trip filmed and edited by Matt 'Noah' Langdon!
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