Even after spending an amazing week at the Rio Fuy in Choshenco getting away from the rain and back to the sun and the heat was great. These past few days have been a nice change of pace for everyone, with the parents arriving and everyone tired from long days at the Fuy. The teachers decided to change to half days of school for the remaining time here in Pucon. Giving the students and teachers time to relax and more time on the water. On an academic note, after 3 weeks of working on our puppet show “Caperucita Roja” aka Little Red Ridding Hood, in our Spanish 3 class, we finally got to present it to the rest of the students, teachers and families. Lorenzo has the perfect scary wolf voice, kyle pulled off the squeaky girly voice of little red ridding hood without laughing to much. David Gorski had two characters, one as the narrator and the other as the brave woodcutter who saves the day. Taylor was the voice of the caring mother and I was the voice of sweet little old Granny. After the puppy show, Mr Hughes had the wonderful idea of playing a game of spoons with everyone including the parents. Gosh I love that game and got way to hyper playing it. Clay and I dominated to say the least, without getting any letters while Kyle was the first to go, Matt Smink fallowed shortly after. For leader ship class this past week, we’ve been working on making systems for everything here at the base so everything can run a little more smoothly which we presented to the rest of the students 2 days ago. I was really excited when my parents arrived with my camera so I could finally start taking some pictures in photo class. Our assignment for the day we did classes in town was to take life style shoots. Which involved sometimes asking people if you could take their pictures or just snapping a few photos without them knowing. Then the next photo class we had to get our best pictures together and show them to the class, we would talk about each one and Matt would tell us what he liked about it and also how we could improve it to make it a stronger picture next time. Yesterday Callie, Tracy and Jess had their mentor activity. First the ladies made dessert which was a chocolate fondue with fruit then once we cleaned up the Quincho and Taylor cleaned her face we all piled into the Tahoe and headed to the hot springs for a couple of hours. This morning while most of the students decided to take full advantage of their time to sleep in a few of the students got up to do a morning workout kayak session till regular morning working started at 9:30. Then periods 4 threw 7 then to the rio. While I opted out of kayaking today to spend the last afternoon/ evening with my parents before they leave tomorrow morning. It’s been great having them around for a week. It’s nice to be able to share my experiences with my parents who make it possible for me to travel to awesome places like Chile.

- Katie Kowalski

My first couple weeks in Chile have been incredible. I’ve seen and run some of the biggest and most spectacular whitewater of my life. It seems like there is a new river or lake around every turn in the road, and I can’t wait to explore more of this country.
Our first week here we stayed at Dave’s house in Pucon. I became accustomed to the Trancura river which the property borders. On the Trancura, I got familiar with the feel of the river since I hadn’t been on anything big since October. Right below our house, the Trancura features a great playwave, and the upper sections offers good class III-IV river running. I spent a lot of time with Billy Harris on the Trancura learning my boof.
We spent our second week here in the tiny, one-road lake town Choshuenco. Our focus in Choshuenco was on one river, the Rio Fuy. On our first day at the Fuy we drove up to the water fall Leona, a clean 25 footer, and I ran my first waterfall. The lower Fuy offers some nice play and a great place to perfect boof strokes and eddie turns. The middle Fuy is an action packed run with waves and holes everywhere. The upper Fuy is a smaller water run with multiple waterfalls. The blue water of the Fuy leaves it one of my favorite rivers in the world.
After the week in Choshuenco we are back in Pucon. Yesterday, I ran the Rio Palguin for the first time. It is a creeking run in a beautiful canyon. The Palguin is my favorite run so far in Chile because of its scenery and fun rapids.

Here are a few whitewater photos that I don’t think yinz have seen. We are doing a continuing project with whitewater photography the whole time while in Chile. See you on the water!

I woke up this morning for  workout and as I walked out I noticed beautiful clouds in the sky.  As workout continued the clouds slowly got darker and darker, looking as if it was going to rain.  I was kind of bummed about it raining again but as the day went on the clouds broke and the sun came out.  Now it is very sunny and really warm.  It actually feels like summer now!

Yesterday we ran the Rio Palguin which is my favorite run in Pucon.  It has about 5 main rapids.  There is the first rapid which is a double drop.  It has a 5 foot drop at the beginning and then right after that there is  an 8 footer.  This is my favorite of the rapids.  The others range from 5 foot waterfalls to 20 feet. All the parents who are down here not only got to see this amazing river but also got to see us paddle;  I bet it was a lot of fun for them.

Hi everyone!

My name is Jessica Droujko and I’m a new student here at New River Academy. I arrived in Pucon on January 29th, two days after everyone else arrived. I was a little afraid that I would arrive here and everyone else would already have friends and wouldn’t need me, but that was not the case, everyone here was very welcoming. The school is very different from my high school in Niagara Falls, especially since I’m Canadian. But the teachers are awesome, and they’re really good at what they do. They’re following my curriculum and working from my textbooks. And it is so much easier since the classes are so small. My largest class is Spanish 1 and it has four students in it. After seven classes and lunch, we head off to the river with our teachers/coaches. Our base is right next to the Trencura River, so we will get to run this beautiful river a lot. I have only ran it once so far, and i have also done safety on it. We also just returned from Choshuenco today. It’s about three hours away from Pucon, and we spent the last week there paddling the Rio Fui. That river has three parts to it: the upper, middle and lower, and we got to run a different part of it everyday. We also got to visit Huilo-Huilo waterfall. The upper has a 25 foot waterfall on it, which we all got to run. It was amazing! Some of us had better lines than the rest of us but we everything turned out great.

Now we are back in Pucon, and ready for the next adventure.

Jessica Droujko