PS 2005 Worlds Complete

Sorry PVH, sometimes you just gotta throw down and giver...
copyright castillo 2005

For those of you who know me... This should come as no surprise... If my padding obesssion is new to you, then bear with me.

A brief sum up... Worlds is an event that puts all the best paddlers from all over the (yep you got it) world to compete and show who's been working hard having fun, and who's just been workin... This year the World competition was held at the 2004 Sydney games whitewter course in Penrith Austraila. Quite a cool location if one might say. A conveyor belt shuttled participants from the bottom to the top of the course and it was a sweet feature... Doesn't get much better than that. Generally team USA fairs well, but this year our neighbors to the north had a damn good prospect. Local Beachburg resident the one and only Billy Harris. Beachburg Ontario is like the mecca of paddling, rather quite close to it. Located ten minutes or less from the Ottawa river it is a loathed place of residents for many boaters... Yet only a handful are lucky enough to call it thier home...

Anyhow the results are in and (delayed drum roll) the new freestyle world champion is... Eric Jackson...
Coming back from ranking 5th in the prelims he smoked the competition and ended up going through multiple head to head rounds against Billy to reign champ. I congratulate Eric Jackson on his win as well as the rest of the other athletes for their dedication and love for kayaking. This part of our paddling continum makes our h2O obbessed sport's world turn...

Results are as follows:
K1 Men:
1st Eric Jackson -USA
2nd Billy Harris -CANADA
3rd Jay Kincaid - USA

K1 Women:
1st Julta Kaiser -GERMANY
2nd Kristen Poddlack - USA
3rd Fiona Jarvie - GREAT BRITAIN

Additional results can be found at http://www.xackers.net

*None of these photos are from Alaska, or worlds, but I dug them out of an archive from a few years back on a more than memorable trip to the Ottawa River... I've had the pleasure to paddle with both Billy and EJ both fantastic folks... Enjoy- Castillo