Finally, some goods

This little project failed terribly while Joel and I were in Chile. That's my fault. I could blame Joel for bringing a film camera (those still exist?) but really I had my own technical difficulties, and between lying in hammocks and paddling, there just wasn't much room to get pictures up--or internet access.

But now I'm reincarnating this site into a photo dump as the media starts to trickle in. To start, there's a video on YouTube that's got Joel surfing in the second or third frame:



Actually, I just figured it out. Joel, Steve Keaveny and I had just come over the border from our Pucon/Patagonian booze-cruise recess-epic, and then spent about four hours trying to hitch a ride back to camp (that's a pretty short wait for this part of the world). Finally, right as it was getting dark, the guy in this video



and his wife and their daughter, just arrived from Santiago, stopped and packed us and our stuff into their subcompact. I remember strapping our paddles diagonally across the roof rack, with our backpacks on top of those, and driving 35 potholed kilometers to camp with the little car bottomed out, sharing Escudos in the back seat.

One more for good measure:



This rapid starts with a good long class IV entrance before funneling into Mundaca and mini-Mundaca, two massive holes at the bottom. The best line, seen here, is to run the nuts and plow into the holy-shit-holes head on. They're huge, and terrifying from shore, but there's so much water running through them that they'll *usually* flush quickly. I liked to run it like the second guy, upside-down, until my skirt started trying to implode as it wore out.

More to come.

Joe