SeaKayakingSweden - Paddling Kolarmoraån with friends, or so we thought!

(Ursäkta mina svenska tittare, men jag har valt att bara ha en engelsk beskrivning, denna gång iaf)

My friends and I have a tradition to start off a new kayaking season by paddling some nearby small river (brook). This year I organized two such trips and this video covers the first one. Within a couple of weeks I hope to have published the video of the second trip (Lilla Färnäsets kanotled) as well.

We chose one of our favorite rivers, Kolarmoraån, which we have paddled numerous times in the past. The weather forecast was good up to a week ahead but unfortunately changed to the worse as the weekend neared. So the temperature had dropped 10°C and we could expect some rain and more wind as well.

Shortly after taking off from Måviksbadet on lake Vällen we met a few paddlers that warned us that we might not be able to paddle the river due to stormed felled trees :-(. We decided to proceed and check ourselves. Shortly after crossing Vällen and entering Kolarmoraån we reached the dam which controls the water level in Vällen. We sent a scout downstream to see how far we could paddle before hitting the first obstacle. After only roughly 300m (0,2miles) he concluded that the first felled tree blocked the river and, was due to the steep shores, not easy to pass by getting out of our kayaks and carry them past the obstacle. And who knows how many more felled trees we would encounter. So we decided to take a lunch break and figure what to do instead of just returning home again. But before lunch Ville and Christophe decided to see what it was like to roll in the rapid water just below the dam.

Looking at the map during lunch made it obvious that it would be more rewarding to paddle south on lake Vällen since there are several islands there and also Vällsån tributary which was interesting to check out and see if it could be paddled. Shortly before reaching the bridge across Vällen we studied an Osprey (Fiskgjuse) nesting in a treetop. We continued to the very south end of Vällen only to find that Vällsån tributary was more or less impossible to find/paddle due to the very dense growth of reeds. The rain and headwind had by then increased then so we headed straight back to our cars at Måviksbadet.

All in all it was good to get out on the water and be in nature even if the trip was not at all as we planned :-)

You can see the route we paddled here: https://kartor.eniro.se/m/dElSp