Do you know the Far Side cartoon which has the quote "excuse me, sir, my brain is full"? I have it on one of my coffee mugs, and that's pretty much how I felt at various points this past weekend. If my mind is a sponge, it has a definite saturation point and stops absorbing stuff. There was a lot of "stuff" for me to take up. So, no doubt I failed to grasp a whole bunch during this past weekend's introductory whitewater weekend, but it feels like I learned a lot. And since I'm excited about all the stuff I learned, I'm of course going to bubble on about it for a while.

Lee and I did a mini weekend course with Rolf Kraiker on the French River - our objective? To get introduced to whitewater, with the ultimate goal of working up to the skills you'd need to go on a remote river trip. It's a lofty goal when all you know about moving water could easily be captured in a cartoon size panel on a coffee mug. But Rolf is good at explaining things and very patient.

We started with a flatwater paddle including a very short portage from the car. Rolf stopped us about an hour in to give us advice on our strokes, and I learned to rotate my blade the other way on the recovery. Then we went over stationary spins - draw/draw and cross-draw/sweep. This was then translated to canoes with some momentum when we did a drill called "bumper boats". We didn't actually bump boats, but that was the objective of the drill.

Very soon we came to the first bit of moving water on the trip, Little Pine rapids. Rolf explained that you should wear your PFD while scouting, and then went over some very basic ideas of reading moving water. We learned about pillows, curling waves, standing waves, and black water. Rather than point, Rolf tossed rocks at the features he was pointing out (his aim is fantastic).

Then Rolf took both of the canoes down and we watched. We did the same thing at Big Pine rapids - that one looked big and scary to me, and I couldn't see a path through it which wouldn't end in boat munching but Rolf's rocks pointed it out. Then he also pointed out that it would take some skill to actually connect those dots, and he showed us his skills as he ran the boats down. He put them in an eddy near the bottom, and let us paddle through the boulder garden at the end. This was plenty of excitement for my little novice heart at this point.

When we got to Double Rapids, we took the gear out of the boats and had lunch. Then we spent the first part of the afternoon learning basic skills in the two parts of the rapid - we were introduced to the idea of ferrying across a current (and it didn't click until Rolf got into the boat with each of us and we got to feel it). Once we got a bit more comfortable, Rolf added in a lean while we were doing it, and the ferries became easier provided we had the right angle.

We had one moment where we got sucked into a tiny little surfing wave in the swifter part of the rapid, but we did as told and leaned the boat and it spit us out. Next we learned peel-outs, but those were natural for us since we started doing them whenever we had the ferrying angle wrong. After some work on eddy-turns (where I learned the difference between an eddy and an eddy-line) we almost went for a swim when we got off balance once and our land-based instincts (so according to Rolf) kicked in and we tried to grab the gunnels. We were in a forgiving boat, though, so no swim.

After a break to set up camp, Rolf said we'd go to The Ladder for some more learning - but there wasn't enough water for it to be useful, so he went with Plan B - which was Blue Chute. We went to look at it, and my chicken-liver instincts kicked in. Not only was I terrified of going down that, but I was really glad I was wearing a wetsuit - it would make dumping and getting banged down the rapids that much less unpleasant (remember to float with feet first, butt tucked up to avoid having your tailbone bumped, Rolf told us).

Blue Chute looked big and scary to a beginner like me. But I don't think I was ever given a chicken alternative, so I had no choice but to get in the boat and ride it down. To my surprise, though, it was just pure fun. We didn't have to do anything but stay in the boat and paddle - and the less I have to do the less opportunity I have to screw up, and we splashed through the waves without mishap.

I wanted to do it over and over, it was so fun - but we didn't get to do it over again for a while, because we were practicing ferrying and eddy turns in the currents at the bottom of the rapids. This was much more of a big deal than Double Rapids had been, but we didn't dump (this made me happy). I was uncharacteristically meek in that I was happy to hang out in the bow and do whatever Lee told me to do - and for the most part, I depended on him to set the angle for the ferries, and concentrated on remembering which way to lean (away from the current). I had a hard time with the leaning.

Then, Rolf let us run the rapids a few more times - there was a pretty quick liftover on river right which would get us back up. I can't get over how much fun I thought running down the rapids was - how could I go from absolutely terrified to wanting to do it over and over again in the space of an hour. We did almost dump when we turned into the eddy at river left at the bottom one time, I'm pretty sure that was my fault - I really did have issues with leaning.

We headed back to camp for dinner, and of course some more instruction. Before we beached the boats for the night, Lee volunteered to dump one of them and I got to rescue him doing a canoe-over-canoe. I was having none of this going out and doing a rescue on my own, though, and made sure Rolf was in the boat with me. That accomplished, we put on dry clothes and devoted ourselves to dinner.

After we ate, Rolf pointed out the differences in the hulls of the two canoes, and the reasons for these. I got to add words like tumblehome and flare to my lexicon. This was followed by a demonstration of a z-drag to extricate a pinned canoe, which naturally led into a lesson on pulleys and knot-tying. Before the weekend, about all I could do was slip knots, granny knots and the trucker's hitch.

Now I can add fisherman's knot (for tying two rope ends together securely), butterfly knot (for putting a non-slip loop in a rope), sheet bend (for making a smooth knot which connects ropes of different diameter, very useful for Rolf's food rope hanging technique), bowline (for a loop) and - my personal favourite - the taut line hitch, which lets you adjust the length of a loop to keep your tarp (or something else) nice and taut, it doesn't slide if it's tight but does if the rope has some slack.

By this time it was getting dark and it was really buggy (yes, it was buggy in September), so we moved to the fire pit where Rolf showed us a trick for starting fires should it be nasty (his trick is much more elegant than my capful of white gas strategy) and he demonstrated his home-made take-down saw and the roofracks-cum-fire irons that work so well for him. By this time, my brain was more than full, and I demonstrated my slack-jawed glazed-eyed stare. So I went to bed, in the hope that I would process some of this stuff while I slept.

And the next day, we did even cooler stuff...