Green Race '08

YoYOyO! Green Race came and went, another fantastic day of '08 down the drain. Here's a shot my dad took of me at the G-munk! Graggle-funk wrote up a longer report on TEAM RIOT. Check it out if you're interested. I ended up in 10th place with a 4:56. 2 seconds behind John Grace, who I had made a bet with 2 days before. My hair is now strawberry blonde...




-Nathan
Riot
NRS
SnapDragon

Canada '08 Video!

Andy Gates finished putting together the footage from the Gatineau and Ottawa rivers. Andy is paddling a Riot Flair, Alan is paddling an Astro, Gragtmans is paddling a Turbo and I am paddling an Orbit (at minibus) and an Astro (at high tension). Also featured: Andrew+Andy from Riverrun, Anthony Yapp and Dave Neiwenhaus (Spelled that wrong probably).

Thanks for putting this vid together Andy!
http://rapidtransitvideo.com/library.php#id=album-4&num=1


-Nathan

CANADA and the LVM Giant Slalom Qualifier!

Silsbee signing in... Recently inspired by my fellow compatriot's blogging action, I decided to update my digital life. My website has a new motto.

'The Flow is the life that we live... It's the air that we breathe, it's the dreams that we sleep, it is the unstoppable force which drives our every action or thought. Kayaking is my weapon to ride the FLOW.'

It's been a great month in my life! Just got back from an epic big-wave surfing trip to Canada where we got more water then you could shake a toilet scrubby at. I'll start from the beginning... Met up with Andy Gates and Alan Young in Asheville, NC... Packed up my crap in a tub... (I had a Rubbermaid tub with several T-shirts, some shorts a nice raincoat, an extra pair of shoes and some cheetos.

We drove straight through to Canada, and after confirming to the border man that the owner of the truck did in fact know we were bringing the truck to Canada, we arrived at the Ottawa river. Blah blah blah, we had lots of fun. After 5 days on mini-bus, we met up with some river-run raft guides named Andy (#2) and Wiley. Cool dudes.

We went to the gatineau river with them and loaded our playboats up with sleeping bags, food, tents and fishing poles. It must have looked like a floating landfill, as all of our gear was wrapped up in black trashbags and strapped onto the outside of our kayaks. We then paddled down to High Tension, my favorite wave in the whole world. I surfed High Tension two years ago, but I'd forgotten how perfect that wave is.




We camped out on the sandy beach and surfed until it got dark. The days that we camped next to High Tension were probably the best playboating days of my life. The Astro was sick on that wave! After 2 nights and 3 days on the river, we left some of our stuff in my tent on the river, and paddled out to get more supplies and meet up with Christopher 'Canadian Bacon' Gragtmans.

Soul surfing (or searching?) on the green glass. (Photo: Chris Gragtmans)


Andy 'the blue dragon' Gates... blunting it up (Photo: Nathan Silsbee)


Alan Pan-am (Photo Andy Gates)


Wiley the backstabber. He likes tea and biscuits. (Photo Andy Gates)


Andy (#2): Helix (Photo: Andy Gates)


Gragginator cleaning it up. (Photo: Nathan Silsbee)


After the Gatineau, we headed to Montreal for a day to say hello to the boys at Riot. (Jeff and Simon). It was cool seeing Santa's factory where those glorious hunks of plastic come from.

After Montreal we headed back to the southeast, just in time for the Giant Slalom Qualifier! What a cool event... John Grace and team set-up gates on the slides below gorilla, making for a very technical and fast-paced race. In addition to the slalom race, there was a timed down-river race from the put-in down to chiefs. Congrats to Graham Cracker for reeling in first place.

The Top 10 overall were as follows:

1. Chris Gragtmans
2. Pat Keller
3. Nathan Silsbee
4. Shane Benedict
5. Tim Bell
6. John Grace
7. Toby Macdermott
8. Caleb Coaplen
9. James Kodaras
10. Fergus Coffee

for the full write-up, visit LVM TV

I will be posting some photos of this event as well as some additional photos from Canada on the new Team Riot website, so stay tuned.

I'm going to leave you with a few photos of me aggravating my roommate's cat.

Fear the toilet scrubby




POV shot... that's right, hide under the table.










Two scrubbies are better then one.














The feline needed to rehydrate during the battle.










See yaull folk on da river sometim'
-Nathan Silsbee

3-D Kayaking Animation

Team N takes 2nd and some 3-D modeling

Time to update the ol' blog mobile. Been up to this and that lately, some raven's fork, some green, some school, some work. Jerry's Baddle (bike/paddle race) was a few weeks ago and as always steven hughes and brooks did an excellent job organizing and making it happen. Big thanks to Shane Benedict for hooking me up with a remix 100 last minute. I didn't actually get my hands on the boat until about 30 minutes before the race began. I was definitely nervous about taking a new boat for the race, but it took care of me. I got a decent kayak time and Nate Wyatt killed the bike, placing team Nathan in second overall. Congrats to Clayton Gaar and Jed Hinckley for taking first. No surprise came when Adam Herzog won the ironman class for the 3rd year in a row. (or 4th?) Looking forward to next year for sure.

In other news, school has gotten very interesting... I just finished up a 3-D modeling class where I developed a 3-D model of a paddler, then animated them running a waterfall. Here are a couple stills of the kayaker and landscape. Don't know if any of you have experience with 3-D modeling, but it's a very tedious process. One must create the models, apply textures and colors, develop the lighting in the scene, create camera angles for stills or animation, animate the characters with skeletons and key-frames, then render everything... which takes forever. I hate rendering.






The landscape... This is kayaking on another planet if you can't tell already.

The waterfall... and no that is not a pterodactyl. No one knows what the hell it is because it's a different planet.

Up close and personal.


This is a closer shot of the dragon-bird-alien. Check out that smile.



A shot from below.


from above.



Trying to be artsy fartsy with the camera angles.


I should have the animation from the previous shots uploaded onto youtube sometime soon. Here are some more shots from my first project in this class. The assignment was to create a futuristic city.

Flying-car parking lot. Observe the church in background.


This is looking from inside the church in the photo above.


Apartment and courtyard.


I hope all you 3-D addicts got your fix. I'm done. I will hopefully be uploading the 3-D animation onto the Riot Blog soon, so stay tuned. Also will be posting a raven update (yes ANOTHER raven blog-post ontop of the millions these days). Here is a still from that trip to hold you over. Big ups to Will Lyons for shooting this one.


Until next time...

Nathan Silsbee

Colorado Video 2007

Finally finished editing the Colorado video. Had to cut it a little shorter then I was hoping so it would fit in the 10:00 youtube time limit, but it's still a good watch. Here are a few video stills from the video.

Shane Groves making a chunky line happen on the North Saint Vrain.


Oh be joyful

Dave Finney keeper 'er steady at Clear Creek.



Shane Dropping in.



Check out the video!



For more information on the rivers in this video, go here:
http://wolverinepublishing.com/whitewater.html

see ya on the river,

Nathan Silsbee

Yule Creek, Potomac Fest and Linville

So I've been pretty slack about updating the blog the last couple months, but I've finally settled down in Asheville again and have found the time to put up some photos. Yule Creek was definitely my favorite thing we got on out west, and seemed to be the Toxaway of Colorado.
Big thanks to Dave Finney for shooting the yule pics.

This is the first big one, adoringly named "ball check"

Dropping into Wall Check.

Making the transition

Launch!

Here's a clip of Wallcheck.

Oriental Massage. Another biggy. This rapid does a lot of things to your back, but I wouldn't say it resembles a massage.

The last 20 footer.


Yule Creek was about as low volume as you can get, so it was a big relief to get on some highwater stuff later in the trip. Here's a shot of Finney running "upper death".


Stay tuned for the video from Colorado.

As soon as we got back from Colorado, we set off for Potomac Fest.



To see the video from Potomac Fest, go HERE

After the Po fest, we traveled home to our desert village of Asheville. The rivers in Asheville were thirstier then a dead bullfrog. Finally it rained just enough to make Linville a runnable level, and we got our class V fix. Shout-out to Jesse Lewinsky for these wingdinger photographs.

Dropping into "homie's slot", or "fight club", or any of the dozen names this rapid seems to have.


Dylan moving in for the knock-out at fightclub.


Billy Murphy keeping his bow up.

Spencer utilizing his plastic exoskeleton to slide over a rock.


that's all I got for now. Hopefully I'll get the Colorado video in order some point soon, and post that as well. Until next time,

Nathan Silsbee




And don't forget you can find discount pooper scoopers at your local ingles.