Hunt Jennings: Keeping Cool While Plummeting Over 100-Foot Waterfalls In a Kayak is a Tom Rowland Podcast conversation with a professional extreme kayaker who has run waterfalls over one hundred feet tall and built a career teaching people how to get into the sport safely, one step at a time.
Press play above to watch the full conversation with Hunt Jennings.
Hunt Jennings is a professional and extreme whitewater kayaker who has run a slew of waterfalls, including drops of one hundred feet or more. He is known in the kayaking community both for his own runs and for helping newcomers find a safe way into the sport.
Hunt describes spending a long time deciding whether he was attempting a drop for the right reasons, not just because it looked possible. Once he commits, the next step is building a real safety plan around the run rather than treating it as a spur of the moment stunt.
Find a local community of kayakers first, often through a Facebook group or a club like a regional canoe club, rather than trying to teach yourself in isolation. Hunt says the kayaking community is unusually welcoming to newcomers and wants to share the sport, so beginners should not be intimidated to reach out.
A river-running style kayak, which is longer and more stable than a trick-focused play boat, is the common starting point. Many kayakers buy their first boat used, since there is a strong secondhand market, and match the boat to their height, weight, and the type of kayaking they want to do.
Slowly. Hunt warns against buying all the gear, meeting a few people, and jumping onto water that is over your head too quickly. Progression should be paced so you stay comfortable rather than getting in over your head and scaring yourself out of the sport.
This past weekend we took my son Hayden to college, the second of our kids to leave the nest, and it got me thinking about how much all of our kids have grown up on camera on this show. Hunt lives at the opposite extreme of caution from most of what I do on the water, dropping a kayak off ledges most people would never even look at, and I wanted to sit down with someone who has made a career out of deciding, carefully, when a risk like that is worth taking.
Hunt told me that before he drops something in the eighty-foot range, the real question is not whether the kayak and the water will cooperate, it is whether he is doing it for the right reason. That gut check comes before any gear gets packed. Only after he has answered it honestly does the actual safety planning start. He walks through what goes into that plan in the episode, and it is worth hearing directly from him.
Hunt spends a good part of the conversation on the exact advice he would give someone who says a video of him looks cool and asks how to start. Find your people first, get a forgiving first boat, and go slowly. He breaks down why kayaking communities tend to welcome beginners more than a sport like surfing does, and what happens to people who skip the slow progression. The full breakdown is worth hearing in his own words.
Watching my kids grow up through the footage of this show reminded me how much perspective changes the way you look at risk, and talking with Hunt about how deliberately he approaches something as extreme as a hundred-foot waterfall drop was a good reminder that the biggest risks are usually the most carefully planned ones. Press play above to hear the whole conversation.
Hunt Jennings, Tom Rowland, Hayden Rowland, Turner Rowland
Hunt Jennings is a professional and extreme whitewater kayaker known for running waterfalls over one hundred feet, and for his work helping new paddlers find a safe, welcoming way into the sport of kayaking.
EP 34/47 | Hunt Jennings - Keeping Cool While Plummeting Over 100 Foot Waterfalls In A Kayak
This weekend, we took my son, Hayden Rowland, to college. It was an emotional time. It's the second of our kids to leave the nest and go to college. We still have one left at home. But it really got me thinking about Hayden growing up and Turner growing up and the boys leaving the house and Hannah still being there, and got a little emotional, a little sentimental. And I wanted to watch some of the shows that we had done and see how the kids had grown. So I pulled up Waypoint TV on the Apple TV, and I easily went back through all of our episodes and found the first ever episode that we filmed with the kids. And Hayden was just a little boy. Turner was a little boy. Austin, Rich's son, was literally a baby. Then I just progressed through the seasons and watched how the kids had grown, and it was just such an easy way to watch what I wanted to watch.
[Hunt Jennings]: I spent a long time looking at it. I think, for me, that was probably one of the biggest decisions I made, like, am I doing this for the right reason or not. But I decided that I wanted to do it, and so we set up a big safety plan and made it happen. Essentially it was kind of probably like a seventy or eighty foot drop, but it lands right against a rock shelf.
[From the companion How 2 Tuesday, "I have a special guest, Hunt Jennings"]: Hunt Jennings is and was a professional kayaker and all around extreme kayaking guy. He's done a hundred foot waterfalls and a slew of waterfalls that are shorter than that. I asked him to join us to give us a How 2 Tuesday for somebody that wants to get into kayaking.
[Hunt Jennings]: That's a good question, people ask me that a lot. I think kayaking at first can be kind of an intimidating thing to get into because it's a scary sport. There's a lot of unknowns to it, a lot of different things that I think people just don't end up ever getting to experience kayaking because they don't know how to get into it. So I would say the first thing is, find somewhere in your community or close to you that has other kayakers. Sometimes it's an unofficial group, like on Facebook or something, and you can find it. Kayakers are usually very open to other people, and people are usually very excited to help you get involved, because we want to share the passion that we have for the sport with other people. So it's not like surfing, where you're going to get kicked off the beach or something. So you don't need to be intimidated, first of all. A lot of places, like the Chattanooga area, have boating info Facebook pages. We have the Tennessee Valley Canoe Club. A lot of people get started through clubs, and that's a good way to meet people, meet friends, and go out and do it.
I think the biggest thing is finding people like that, friends to go with, because kayaking is something you don't want to do by yourself, something you can't do safely by yourself. And I was very blessed growing up learning how to do it with teachers and friends who pursued it beside me. So I'd say the first thing is, be open and don't be intimidated. Just get involved. People will be stoked that you're wanting to get out, and they'll help you. The other thing is, take it very slowly. I think a lot of people get excited, meet people, buy all their gear, and then jump into a river that's a little over their head too fast. I think being wise about what you get on, and how fast you progress onto it, is important too. And then also finding the right kayak is really important. The kayak makes a difference, depending on what you're wanting to do with kayaking, and also your height and weight, everything kind of needs to match up. My first kayak was what they call a river running play boat, so a river runner would be a longer kayak that you couldn't really do tricks in, it's really stable. A play boat is the opposite end of the spectrum, where it's small and tippy.
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