The wrong white water

Before I go any further, I must warn any rafting readers that the following post may prove disturbing.

Upon moving to Canberra, I looked around for a convenient student group with whom I could go white water rafting. Alas, it seems rafting is not the sport of choice for Canberrans*. So I took up other activities, went canyoning and rock-climbing, got into mountaineering and started sea kayaking. I kayaked on the lake and did a couple of trips out to the coast to paddle there, even tried surfing a kayak. What I did not do was try paddling a kayak on a river.

Rafting down in Tasmania, I met my fair share of kayakers. A lot of them had been rafters once, but turned to kayaking to escape the inevitable faff of rafting's large groups and excessive gear. Others sought the greater thrill and challenge of kayaking, or just a whole lot less work in portaging around rapids. Whatever the reason for their transition, it was seldom reversible; very few returned to rafting after taking up its dark cousin as a pastime, and those exceptions would often bring their kayaks on trips rather than risk boarding a raft. Clearly the kayaks had seductive powers beyond the strength of mere mortals to resist, making any transition a one-way trip. I had gone so far as to take up sea-kayaking and even surf-kayaking—while it's technically possible to surf a raft, the ocean waves are scarcely their element—but I was leaving the rivers to the rafts... until Sunday.

I should have resisted, should have fought harder against the threat kayaking posed to my rafting integrity. Honestly though, I missed the river. There's something awesome about sitting in a river flowing at 70 cumecs†—power enough to crush you in an instant—and looking at the surface but seeing what's hidden beneath it. The combined sense of helplessness against something so strong and confidence from knowing what to do to make it across that water alive is one that I cherish. I hadn't had that feeling since rafting the Franklin over the summer, and wanted to feel it again. Nearly ten years rafting doesn't qualify me for kayaking though, which is a whole new level of terror with a whole lot less control. I wasn't sitting in a kayak anywhere near the rivers I was used to, and there hadn't been any beginners white water kayaking trips in a while. Then one was posted on the ANUMC website, a grade 1-2 section of the Murrumbidgee. So I donned my new ladies' wetsuit (I'll start buying men's outdoor clothing again when the manufacturers stop assuming that all men are overweight and start making clothes for men who are fit because they spend time outdoors), armoured lifejacket and a helmet with my latest ad hoc GoPro mount. After discovering that my knees don't get along well with bracing in a lot of white water kayaks, I spent some time sitting in different kayaks until stumbling across one that wasn't just bearable but was actually comfortable.

We strapped kayaks onto the club trailer and towed it to the get-in at Tharwa Bridge. From there, it was less than 15km down to our get-out at Pine Island. Alas, most of those kilometres turned out to be flat paddling. In between though, there were rapids... well, close enough. Tassie rafters, think of the lower Derwent, only with a few more trees mid-river and without the actually becalmed sections. I assume that any other paddlers will know of a mostly flat river suitable for beginners that can be used as a comparison. On a raft, I would have been dead-bored (my usual way of keeping myself entertained on flat water is to flip my own raft, flip someone else's raft or otherwise conspire to have more people swimming than are in the boats). I could have done with shorter sections of flat-water, but the rapids proved a good introduction to white water kayaking.

The first few rapids were all firmly in grade 1 and easily passed. Then we hit a grade 2. On a raft, I would have paddled straight over the top without pausing, certainly without scouting. The wave train would have given me a moment's entertainment, and that would have been it. A group comprising no small number of beginners needed to be more cautious. A couple of experienced kayakers went ahead to scout, pulling into eddies to point the way for those following behind as we wove between willow saplings. It was easier than I'd expected, kayaks having a lot less momentum to fight against in order to turn them. It was just as terrifying as I'd expected. Let me stress, this was an easy rapid, requiring some quick turns to follow the best lines but with plenty of good lines to choose from. I would have been more than happy to swim it, but apparently kayaking it is a whole different story. My adrenaline levels went through buzz and rush, then kept climbing.

I will gladly confess that I'm an adrenaline junky, but I like it to be delivered in levels that give me an edge and focus my senses, not overwhelm my rationality. I haven't hit the panic level in a few years, and I was quite happy keeping it that way. Apparently skirting around an itsy bitsy stopper at the end of a rapid and having my kayak roll ever so slightly was enough to trigger a panic response. All these years of steadily dosing myself with adrenaline must have been good for something, because I successfully fought the urge to run away (which would simply have resulted in me rolling upside-down) and made it through the rapid without a hitch. When my heart stopped sounding like a bodhrán beating out a quick jig, I realised that I was actually enjoying myself.

If you look closely, you might notice the

boat rock slightly at 0:36. 

There were a few more rapids at similar levels, which lacked the blind terror of the first and helped to remind me that this was an easy river. If I had flipped (which seemed to be my greatest fear) I would just have wet-exited and swam (which didn't scare me at all), rather than faff around trying to set up and perform my somewhat unreliable brace-roll. Most of the group portaged (hoisted boats onto shoulders and walked) one rapid, basically because it was completely choked with willows and we all portaged over the Point Hut bridge with it's recirculating stopper.

Shortly before the end of our section of river, we came across a boat, upside-down and pinned beneath a log. First thing to check: whether there was a body in it. 

Fortunately it was body-free. It was also clearly a flat water craft, meant for fishing on a lake and never intended to tackle white water. We pulled it free and it half-floated briefly before sinking like a stone.

Towing the "rescued" kayak to shore.

Most of the group were all for heading back then, and we paddled the last rapid to the get-out. Three of us kept our lifejackets on, grabbed some rope and walked back up the riverbank. The kayak was submerged mid-river, wrapped on some rocks. We had to swim across channels up to chest-deep before we could reach it. Getting it unstuck proved simple, but returning to shore burdened with a kayak was a more difficult task. We barely had it out of the water when someone came looking for us, car shuffle and packing of the trailer now complete. Triumphantly carrying our prize back, we encountered someone who had just bought an identical kayak and was considering rafting the next section (grade 3-4). Fortunately he was somewhat dissuaded by the condition of the boat we'd retrieved. I sincerely hope I never become that complacent about kayaking on white water, but I'm glad that my spine-crushing terror has faded.

*Early on, I heard Canberra residents described a few times as Canberrites and Canberrians, but Canberrans seems to be the term of choice.

†A cumec is a unit often used by white water paddlers to measure river flow. It stands for cubic metres per second and is the volume of water that passes through one point on a river every second. In theory, it's easy to calculate. All you need is the cross-sectional area of the river, and the average flow rate across that area. In practice, it's almost impossible to measure either number. Yes, you can measure the width of the river, but the depth varies across that width. Yes you can measure the flow of one point in the river, but that varies even more across the width and depth of the river, with eddies (backflow) actually forming along the banks and riverbed. Fortunately there are companies (generally running hydroelectric schemes) who survey rivers and work out their flow rates at different levels, and then give the numbers to anyone who wants them.

Faffing about gerunds

FAF, or faff, is a word that I have found in common usage among outdoor clubs. Faffing is the process of wasting time or being unnecessarily slow and delaying the group you're with. Faffers are those who faff habitually and are almost always late. It's a word well-suited to such clubs and I rarely encountered it anywhere else. This—I thought—was because of the word's origins. FAF was first introduced to me as an acronym standing for F**k Around Factor. I accepted the etymology then and thought no more on the matter, until I decided to look it up in a dictionary. Why I thought it would even be listed remains a mystery to this day, but still I checked and discovered—not "FAF" as I had sought—an entry for "faff" instead.

The OED defines faff as a verb meaning to fuss or to dither. It traces its usage back to 1874 and its etymology back even further to faffle, whose use was recorded in Manipulus Vocabulorum* in 1570. Clearly faff had more history than I had suspected. I thought little more of the matter then, apart from now considering it usable in polite company^†.

But there's more to faff than I'd first thought. Faff is a verb (or "doing word," as my few school-level grammar lessons quite inadequately described them). As well as their shared semantic (meaning-based) traits, verbs share morphological (form-based) and syntactic (structural) traits. This isn't a lesson on verbs (a word class that I'm only beginning to understand), so I'll ignore almost all the traits of verbs and focus on one in particular. In English, verbs cannot be preceded by articles (eg. the, a, an). Articles precede nouns, not verbs. Try saying a few and see how they sound.

"I can write a sentence," sounds fine, but "and the result is the write I have made" does not. Similarly, "I could edit that last sentence to be grammatically correct," sounds fine—if a little formal—but "and the result would be an edit I have made" sounds... fine actually, overly formal but not wrong, per se. That's odd.

So, verbs can't be preceded by articles, except where—apparently—they can. In these cases, the verb is being used as a noun. These are a form of nominalization, where non-nouns can be used as nouns. What does this have to do with faff? Faff may be defined as a verb, but it's now double-timing as a noun on the side. If I faff around all morning, the faff that results can be overwhelming. This all seems like a pretty long-winded way of getting to the point, but I'm talking about wasting time so that seems appropriate.

What does this have to do with this post's title? Gerunds are a particular type of nominalization (specifically, non-finite verb phrases than can be used as noun phrases). They appear in several languages and are pretty easy to spot in English. Just keep an eye out for nouns that look suspiciously like verbs in the perfect participle (also known as the present participle). What am I talking about? Basically, verbs that end in -ing: I am running (verb) more since being inspired by watching the running (noun) last week. Keep an ear out for them next time you're waiting for people to stop faffing about; they're actually pretty common.

* Manipulus Vocabulorum, published in 1570, is a dictionary of Latin and English that was the first dictionary to organise words by rhyme. Despite the claim that Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604, was the first monolingual dictionary (that is, it lists words from a language along with definitions written in that same language), Manipulus Vocabulorum includes a section that gives English definitions for English words.

^† I was once asked what FAF meant by someone to whom the definition as I knew it would have been terribly offensive. Suffice to say, I'm more than happy to give the definition of faff if requested.

Summer Sorbets

As September struck Canberra, it brought with it the hottest start of spring on record. Although peak temperatures soon dropped back into the mid teens, the brief foray over 25°C was enough to set my summer tastebuds racing. What were they craving? Sorbet.

My introduction to sorbets took place somewhen back in the fog of early childhood, and lemon sorbet has been a favourite of mine for as long as I can remember. Tragically, it was succeeded last summer, ousted from its place by my sister's sorbet experiments. Her gin & tonic sorbet was delicious, but lime was the real challenger. Now, living 850 km away from her experiments, I've found myself craving homemade sorbets once more. Fortunately, recipes can be emailed easily. Unfortunately, icecream makers can't.

Enter Sam Tan's blog, on which she describes a simple method to make sorbets without the use of an icecream maker. The ingredients are not dissimilar from most sorbet recipes and I glossed over the list in my habitually non-attentive manner. The important thing is how to freeze the mix, not what it contains. Unfortunately it isn't a quick freeze, so the sorbet really has to be prepared the day before consumption. Feel free to play with the quantities; I always do.

Basic Sorbet Mixture

• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 cups water
• 1 egg white
• Flavouring
• Wine (not only optional but, some might argue, entirely unrelated to the recipe)
• Novel of choice

The quantity of flavouring required varies greatly, not just by your personal taste but also by what sorbet you're making. I've put some below that are to my taste.

• Start off by making a sugar syrup. Combine the sugar and water in a saucepan on medium heat. Stir until sugar has dissolved then allow to cool.
• While your syrup is cooling, whisk the egg white until it forms stiff peaks.

  

  Scum!

• Combine your flavouring of choice with the sugar syrup. Pour combined syrup slowly into your egg whites while whisking gently. If you're used to making a meringue by pouring sugar syrup into beaten egg whites, don't panic when you don't get the usual gloriously silky cream. Instead, you should be expecting cloudy liquid topped with a thin layer of white scum. Yes, it does look that unappetising, but I guarantee you that it improves later.

So far, this is quite similar to the recipe books that come with most icecream makers (although they probably don't tell you that a layer of scum is a good thing). At this point, you'd transfer it to your machine and turn it on. Then all you'd have to do is sit back with a glass of wine and your favourite novel for an hour while waiting for your glorious sorbet to make itself. This isn't quite so simple, but don't abandon the wine yet.

• Pour your sorbet mixture (scum and all) into a lidded container and put it in the freezer. The sorbet will expand while freezing and again in later processing. Choose a container large enough to allow for this.
• Sit back with your wine and novel, because there's nothing for you to do for a while.
• Check the sorbet after a couple of hours. When the sides are frozen and the rest of the sorbet has formed an icy slush, stir thoroughly and return to the freezer. It needs to be left for at least three to four hours, but can be left overnight.
• When the sorbet is completely frozen and firm but not solid, transfer it to a food processor and blend thoroughly, stopping to scrape down the sides as necessary. When it is smooth and consistent, return the sorbet to its container and place it back in the freezer.

  

  Sorbet separates while freezing.

• Leave the sorbet for several hours until hard. It will probably separate slightly with a darker layer at the bottom of the container. Blend again until it becomes white and fluffy. Serve immediately or return to the freezer for later.

There you have it, a simple—although time-consuming—method to produce amazing sorbets without an icecream machine. I've listed a few of my preferred recipes below for some inspiration:

Lemon Sorbet
A simple, classic combination of citric tartness with the smooth sweetness of sorbet.

• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 cups water
• 1 egg white
• 1 1/2 cups lemon juice (freshly squeezed is preferable, but not necessary)
• Zest of two lemons

Follow the method for a basic sorbet.

Lime Sorbet
Lime juice has a stronger flavour to it than most citrus, and you need less for your sorbet. Test the flavour as you go though; you can add more juice after the first or second freeze.

• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 cups water
• 1 egg white
• 1 cup lime juice (freshly squeezed is preferable, but not necessary)
• Zest of two limes

Follow method for a basic sorbet.

Ginger Sorbet

This is an unusual one that I tried as an experiment. If you're a ginger fan, this balance of sweet, tart and a good tingle from the ginger is for you. It's a particularly good one to try if you make your own crystallised or glacé ginger.

• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1 egg white
• 1/4 cup ginger syrup (leftover from making glacé ginger)
• 1-2 cm fresh ginger, finely grated
• 1/4 cup lemon juice

Add the ginger syrup and grated fresh ginger along with the sugar and water when making the syrup. Add the lemon juice after it has cooled. Then follow the rest of the method for a basic sorbet.