I SUP'd the Iconic Lower Trancura River

The town of Pucón in Chile is an adventure mecca. With Volcano Villarica overlooking the town, spewing ominous smoke from its top and a gorgeous lake nestled alongside cultivated by surging rivers, there is no shortage of sights to see, mountains to climb, or water to be paddled.  A Chile guide book recommended three rivers that anyone interested in whitewater had to run. The Río Trancura was one of them. My Hala Gear teammates, Joey Saputo and Andy O’Brien, met up with Spencer Lacy and his buddy, Lance to shake off the winter rust and SUP the Lower Trancura on January 11th, 2017.

A video posted by C A M I L L E • S W A N (@flowathlete) on Jan 31, 2017 at 9:07am PST

If you find yourself in Pucón, I highly recommend you stop by Kayak Chile, which is off of the main stretch (O’Higgins Street) and talk to Ben May.  Ben is one of the authors for the guidebook Whitewater Chile, and is definitely the go-to guy for beta and the latest intel on the water (no cfs gauges in Chile). I bought his guidebook and am very pleased with it.
Trip Report:
We took a bus from town to the Pucón Kayak Hostel, which is right before the Menetue Bridge (Puente Menetue is what you need to tell the driver, otherwise they might drive you to the city of Menetue, which is in the opposite direction). From town, we only paid about 500 Chilean pesos, which is less than a U.S. dollar and the drive took about 8 minutes.

At the Pucón Kayak Hostel, we inflated our boards and got geared up. We arranged to have PKH to pick us up at the bottom of the run.

We put in just above the rapid at the Menetue Bridge, at the Pucón Kayak Hostel.

The water was still relatively high based off of my observation of the live submerged trees alongside the river banks.

The crux rapid is called El Pescado, and you can scout it from the left side. It is considered a class III rapid. There’s a decent-sized hole in the middle of the top of the rapid, so you have to either go left or right of it (or punch it if you’re hardcore) then ride a wave-train as the river bends to the left. There’s a big eddie on river left at the bottom so it’s easy to hike back to the top and lap the rapid.

The stretch is 12 kms. It took us about an hour and a half to complete.

We took out on river left at the bridge.

Most to all of it was read-and-run and super fun! Be aware that it did get pretty windy for us in the afternoon, so it was an added challenge to keep the board from flipping when the wind caught the underside of it. I highly recommend this run for an intermediate to advanced SUPer because the rapids were relatively low consequence if you found yourself swimming, but it was still a challenging run for us for our first river run of the winter.  I’d love to go back and do it again… and redeem myself on EL PESCADO!! ;)