The Tigers kicked the new slalom season off with a (warm!) splash.  The division 4 slalom race was held at the Dolphin Centre in Darlington town centre for the beginners to slalom canoeing.  We had 43 entries, including 14 C2 crews.  The entries were boosted thanks to support from ROCK (Richmond) and a couple of the other North East based clubs.  But most of the entries were new Tees Tiger members from St. John’s Catholic School in Bishop Auckland where Head Coach Nicky teaches and runs an after school kayak club.  Hopefully we’ll see them all at the next Div 4 race and some at the Div 3 races this year as the evening resulted in 7 promotions plus 8 C2 promotions!

You can find the full results on the Slalom UK website at http://www.canoeslalom.co.uk/info/results.shtml

To add a bit of fun for those more experienced paddlers supporting the event, an open competition was held once the main competition was completed.  Time trials were completed to allocate rankings then it was down to a head to head knock out, with the first one over the finish line through to the next round.  Some of the head to heads were pretty close, some not so!  Matt managed to get disqualified when he missed a gate and Tonksie almost managed to keep up with the Olympian!  But in the end Nicky championed, beating Andrew Martin to second place.

Read on to see some photos from the night.