Canal-surfing kids dice with death

[matt]

While I'm spamming news storied onto the forum - I saw this the other day and didn't get time to post it here.

 

Madness

 

Matt

[Hairy-Neil]

While I'm spamming news storied onto the forum - I saw this the other day and didn't get time to post it here.

 

Madness

 

Matt

 

Says its a new craze....The kids were doing this 20 years ago on the Erewash Canal near Ilkeston.

 

It must be natural selection at work......

[ChrisPy]

Doesn't seem so outrageous to me. We used to canoe-surf on the Thames weirs (and shoot the weir itself when there was enough headroom under the sluice gate frames), particularly in mid-winter (remember 1962/3 ?) when the flow was strongest. Inevitably we spent much of the time swimming in the white water trying to recover our boats. There were a few cases where guys were trapped in the backwash and couldn't get away from the weir without ropes and lifebelts being thrown in to help them. And we occasionally operated the sluices to optimise the flow patterns.

 

Nobody told us about muscle cramps or Weil's disease, as a result we never suffered from either.

 

Kids will be kids. As long as they are not vandalising our property I won't be complaining.

[Paul Evans]

Reminds me of something I saw more than 25 years ago on the Ashton. We must have been the first boat down that morning because all the locks in the flight were full. With a youngish crew of four we made very good time through the locks and by the time we were four or five locks down all the by-washes - deepish concrete channels - were running fit to bust. Around the seventh and eighth locks, a bunch of kids were riding the by-wash streams as well as demonstrating their long jump skills across the lock chambers. The dangers were obvious to fuddy-duddy boaters but no amount of polite remonstration slowed their youthful exuberance. When one decided to ride the gunn'le of the descending boat, I resorted to a completely fictional account of a child I had seen slipping, being crushed and then disembowelled on the prop - a graphic description of crunching bones, flowing blood and guts floating to the surface caused a rapid rethink. We were mightily relieved to get to the bottom of the flight to find nothing more sinister than an unlicensed hunk of polystyrene - the insides of a sofa by the shape - being used as boat.

 

Not that I approve of any of this - after all I am a responsible adult - but kids will be kids, especially on hot sunny days when water is involved.