FAYETTEVILLE - As air temperatures hovered near the freezing point one recent Sunday morning, Sherry Spiker, Jo Beth Stamm and Hannah Vogt pulled on dry-suits, pushed off the shoreline of the New River above snowmelt-engorged Fayette Station Rapids, and began paddling their way toward Abu Dhabi.
The three Fayetteville women, along with fellow Adventures on the Gorge whitewater guides Margaret Cadmus and Koreen Padgen, are members of Sweets of the East, one of seven women's whitewater rafting teams who will compete next month for the right to represent the U.S. in the International Rafting Federation's World Rafting Championships. The event will be held in November on an artificial whitewater stream in the capital city of the United Arab Emirates.
Stamm and Padjen were members of the Colorado-based U.S. team that competed in the 2015 IRF world championship early last December in Indonesia, where they finished eighth.
Sweets of the East, the only women's whitewater rafting team east of the Rockies, is named for Sweet's Falls, a Class V rapid that drops off a 14-foot ledge at the take-out point for many Upper Gauley River commercial rafting trips.
The cataract is also the finish line for the annual Animal Gauley River Race, a 10-mile downriver sprint from the base of Summersville Dam for expert operators of kayaks, rafts and the occasional whitewater-rigged canoe. All members of the Sweets have paddled on winning Animal raft teams.
The Sweets are competing in four-person rafts, with each team allowed an alternate paddler.
"We've been training together since mid-December," Stamm said before the start of the Feb. 28 practice session. In addition to individual cross-training activities like running, biking and working with weights to build core strength, team members get together for weekly workouts at the Oak Hill Holiday Lodge's swimming pool, where they work on paddling cadence, technique and muscle-building repetition from the edge of the pool.
With the national championship race coming up in early April on Oregon's Rogue and Klamath rivers, "we're having four on-water practices a week, weather permitting," Stamm said.
The weather has to be pretty grim to keep the Sweets off the river.
"We've been out when it's so cold you get tears in your eyes," said Spiker. "We did one downriver practice when it was 28 degrees."
Much of the team's on-water time is spent at Hawks Nest Lake, where they loop their way through railroad bridge pilings and get more efficient and confident at paddling as a team. The night before the practice session at Fayette Station, the team paddled until dark at the Cunard put-in/take-out site.
"We're all guides and everyone has a different way of doing things, so the more time we spend together and get to respect each other's strengths, the better we are paddling as a team," said Spiker.
"When you're guiding, you're in back, steering the raft," said Stamm. "In racing, the steering comes mainly from the front, while the power comes from the back. The main thing is to paddle as a team and paddle really hard - harder than you think you need to."
Both national and world rafting championships involve four events - a downriver race, a sprint, two at a time head-to-head races and timed slalom runs. Later this month, the team will travel to Charlotte, North Carolina, where they will hone their slalom skills on a course on an artificial river at the National Whitewater Center.
While whitewater raft racing has been around since 1989, the IRF has been organizing and sanctioning annual world championship races since 1998, including a 2001 event on the Gauley River, the only U.S. world championship race site to date.
While the sport is not as popular in the U.S. as it is in Europe and Japan, interest is growing, and the Sweets would like to see more home-grown teams developing in New River Gorge country.
The team is sponsored by their employer, Adventures on the Gorge, but still must raise most of their travel money on their own. A fundraising event is being planned, and crowd-sourcing is being considered.
"We'd like to start a movement here in West Virginia to get other girls excited about rafting," said Spiker. "Having more teams from here would be great, and we'd welcome them to practice with us." With so many whitewater opportunities nearby, "We should be turning out a lot of world-class athletes here," she said.
Though they've only been paddling as a team for a few months, the Sweets of the East believe they have a decent shot at prevailing during next month's national competition in Oregon.
"We'll be competitive," said Vogt. While this may be the Sweets' first year as a team, they have years of experience as professional guides on the New and Gauley rivers, she observed. "Being able to read the water and know the fastest lines will be an advantage to us. We'll take what we learn from the races in Oregon and, hopefully, take it to Abu Dhabi."
"Man, that sounds warm," Stamm said with a smile, as she helped launch the team's raft into the icy New.
Reach Rick Steelhammer at rsteelhammer@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5169, or follow @rsteelhammer on Twitter.
