Trip to Lyon Part 1

So I am back after an awesome week at one of the best playspots in Europe. Although the water level wasn´t as good as we hoped it would be, we had a great time.
Me, Jan "BUBU" Bubnik, Dusan Bubnik and Petr "PEPE" Prause left Prague on Sunday morning in Dusan´s van. We arrived on Sunday afternoon. The water level was really low that day. However, there were quite a few paddlers at the spot. We watched them for a while and then we went paddling. It was pretty much the same the whole week: We used to get up around 9 AM and then we had the morning session then lunch and of course we had a long siesta after lunch. We went paddling again usually in the evening after the other paddlers quit the spot. There were various groups of paddlers: our group from Czech Rep., a large group from Sheffield, two friendly Irishmen, Strohmeier bros and their friend Xavier from Germany, Jon and Christine from the UK and many others... A Canadian c-ler Guillaume La Rue also showed up with his friend so it was quite a cosmopolitan spot...

How was the wave:
We experienced waterlevels varying from 0.4m to 0.7m (check here).
The first thing to say about the wave is that it is not reachable from the eddies so you have to paddle to the middle of the river and then try to hit the wave from the upstream... Really exhausting...
The wave has a huge foam pile in the middle and powerful shoulders. It was about 1.5 m high at the best water level we had.

Jan (the yellow boat) and German paddler Xavier enjoying a simultaneous ride on the Hawaii at the best level.

The wave was quite hard to catch because you had to hit the foam pile in the center of the wave. The exact place you needed to hit was actually only like 1.5 m wide at max... So especially for me it was really hard to catch the wave and I had to sustain quite a few flushes... If you don´t have lots of experience with waves like this, be prepared to flush quite often. It is really frustrating.

Trying to catch the wave.

The left shoulder of the wave (facing upstream) was the best place to launch the moves, at this level it was the highest part of the wave. It was really steep and green. It was really easy to flush while trying to line up for a move there though...
The shoulder was also really bouncy. It was really exciting even to frontsurf it.

Bouncing down the green water (I usually almost bit my tongue off)

But if you lined up for a move correctly you always went HUGE and even without any extra effort...

One of my very few successful offside blunts.

PePe launching a left blunt.

The comments on the surroundings, on my personal development during our stay and lots of photos and a video coming soon.