World Championships - Thun, Switzerland

The worlds at Thun was a great experience but also pretty frustrating at times.

The area was well nice we were camping on the edge of lake thun and had views of the snow covered mountains in the distance despite it being really hot. The city was also nice with really pretty buildings etc. The wave and trying to get on it was the annoying part. The wave is set by adjusting the gates upstream to a certain setting whilst maintaining a steady level of the lake. First off it was tuned late which meant no wave until wednesday morning after being promised it Monday afternoon. The organisers claimed to know how to set the wave but through the training week it was really inconsistent sometimes completely greening out resulting in some countries having to abandon there training sessions. Each paddler was given 3 mins a day training on the wave which makes it hard to learn a new feature. So the only other option was to paddle outside of the team training slots which ran from 8am to 8pm. I got up at 4am to paddle one night and halfway through my sleep at 1am another night but even in the middle of the night when the city was completely dead the wave was packed and eddy queues lasted around 15mins so it was a nightmare.
In the end I finished 39th out of 110, initially I was a bit disappointed with this as I could have done better but in the world it’s a decent ranking.