If you’ve never been a commercial river guide and you want to learn how to row a raft—or take your skills up a notch with some professional supervision—a rafting clinic is the answer. You can choose from a variety of rafting courses to match your goals as a private boater, whether you want to get comfortable taking your friends and family on private trips, dial in your skills for more advanced whitewater, or learn basic safety principles.
Different course providers offer different itineraries, lengths of classes, and levels of customization. Start your journey by considering what skills you want to acquire in the course. Are you starting from zero and want to be able to row a boat competently through Class II or Class III water? Or do you have some experience but want to build your confidence, practice specific skills (such as catching eddies), or get first-hand feedback from peers and instructors about raft setup and rigging?
Another consideration is how much time you can spend: Many classes are conducted on multi-day river trips, others are condensed into a weekend, and some can be tailored to your goals and time slot.
Here’s the lowdown from professional instructors across the West on the types of courses that are available these days, what to expect from a class, and how to get the most out of your investment in a rafting class. I’m focusing here on rowing clinics for relatively inexperienced boaters, primarily conducted on Class II or Class III whitewater, but many programs also offer advanced rowing courses and clinics that include instruction in both rowing and paddle rafting.
Table of Contents
- Contact a rafting clinic provider
- No previous rowing experience is OK
- Private boater rowing clinics are not guide training
- Your chance to focus on rowing mechanics
- No replacement for swiftwater rescue training
- Learn rafting from people who want to teach
- Acquiring river trip leadership skills
- Working through the scaries
- How to prepare for a rowing clinic
- Making everyone on the river safer
- Keep exploring
Contact a rafting clinic provider
Reach out to one of the clinic providers featured in this post to learn more about their experience, course formats, and schedules:
- Adrift Dinosaur (800-824-0150, Jensen, UT) offers multi-day rowing clinics on the Yampa River.
- Canyon River Instruction (719-398-1180) focuses solely on whitewater education, offering clinics for private rafters (including all-women clinics) and professional guides , swiftwater rescue courses, instructor education and training, and kayak/canoe instruction.
- Northwest Rafting Co. (541-450-9855) offers a full roster of training for both recreational boaters and guides, including multi-day clinics in the US and Ecuador, instructor training, river educator workshops, and private instruction.
- OARS (800-346-6277) offers both raft and dory rowing clinics on rivers throughout the West, including the Lower Salmon, the Rogue, the Green, and the Colorado (Cataract Canyon).
No previous rowing experience is OK
First off, know that it’s OK to come to a rowing clinic with little to no whitewater experience at all—the instructors I talked to said that’s fairly common.
Elisha McArthur, an ACA Level 5 Rafting Instructor Educator Trainer who, with Alan Cammack, co-founded Canyon River Instruction based in Salida, CO, said they get students who have no boating experience at all but saw some rafts on the river and thought it looked like fun. Most often, though, their students have done a handful of trips—either with commercial outfitters or with friends who had some experience—and want to jump into learning how to row their own raft.
“We even get people who grew up with private boaters for parents, but feel like they need someone to explain to them the biomechanics of rowing and the hydrology,” said McArthur. “Our women’s clinics are our most popular classes, and those tend to be made up of people who are saying, ‘My husband is a guide and he’s trying to teach me how to row, and I cannot learn from him.’ ”
So how do rafting clinic instructors cope when they have participants with wildly different skills or aptitude?
“It would seem like that would be a disaster,” said Zach Collier, owner of Northwest Rafting Company in Hood River, OR, and an International Rafting Federation-certified instructor who has been offering rowing clinics for beginner to advanced recreational boaters since 2007. “There’s people who have never been rafting before and there’s people that have done a ton of rafting. But it works out.”
Collier said they typically break people into pods based on skill level and sometimes they put the more advanced students in with the new people as casual mentors.
Davide Ippolito, an instructor for OARS’ recreational rafting clinics, said he usually reaches out to students as soon as he gets the clinic roster to learn more about their experience and goals. He’ll then come to the course with a plan to accommodate different skill levels.
“Then at the pre-trip meeting the night before we head out, I can suss out that either we’re going to be leaning more toward beginner stuff or these people are all dialed in and they want to row rapids,” he said. “I try and play off of the skills of the people who are coming on these trips.”
Private boater rowing clinics are not guide training
Keep in mind that if your intention is to become a commercial guide, a rowing clinic targeted to private boaters isn’t your best option. Guide training is a starkly different experience, with different goals, from rowing clinics designed for recreational boaters.
“People wanting to be guides and people who want training as private boaters—those two don’t mix,” Collier said. “With the 18- or 19-year-old guides, you can say, ‘I don’t care if you’re hung over, you need to make breakfast, pump rafts, get out there.’ But it’s hard to ask, say, a 55-year-old to go to a boot camp. It’s bad to try to mix those groups.”
McArthur said that her early experience as a guide made her realize the opportunities and benefits a course for recreational boaters could bring.
“In whatever company I was working for, the guide school was designed to make sure that all those guides knew exactly how that company wanted things done,” she said. “How to wash wetsuits, how they want the pineapples cut. You’re going to memorize these rapids, and run them this way. But they weren’t necessarily teaching the fundamentals of how to read water or the physics of how the boat actually functions on the water.”
Your chance to focus on rowing mechanics
Rowing clinics give participants hours of time on the oars each day with the opportunity to receive immediate feedback from experts, think about their success and setbacks, and do it all again. That repetition helps cement the skills they’re acquiring and incrementally build confidence.
Adrift Dinosaur conducts their classes on the Yampa River, starting with doing a few reps on the Split Mountain section, said Annie Westbury, Adrift Dinosaur river manager.
“You get familiar with the rapids and start reflecting on what you thought the water was going to do with your craft,” she said “Being able to piece those things together, then come back the very next day to take another run at the same stretch, creates a nice learning progression.”
Collier said that he’s learned over the years that less talking from the instructors yields better results.
“We’ve learned the right amount to teach so it’s not overwhelming,” he said. “We can teach too much, and people hear it all but they can’t absorb it. You need to give them time to practice, then give them time to let it sink in.”
Canyon River Institute starts their clinics in a classroom where they cover basic hydrology before getting out on the water.
“We’ll do a day of flat water as well so that we can just focus on biomechanics and how the boat moves in the water,” McArthur said. “We learn how the oars or the paddle moves and how it functions so that you can really focus on those core foundational pieces.”
From there, they move to more challenging whitewater in the area.
No replacement for swiftwater rescue training
Although some courses will include an introduction to safety skills, every instructor I talked to emphasized that rowing clinics are not intended to replace swiftwater rescue training, which they encourage all private boaters to pursue.
“I make it really clear that this is not a swiftwater rescue course,” said Ippolito. “But I communicate with the guests from day one that if this is something they’re serious about and they want to be leading private trips, it would behoove them to get swiftwater rescue certification from one of the qualified providers.”
Collier said that Northwest Rafting also covers some basic safety practices in their Class III rowing clinics, but it’s not a primary focus. That’s not the case with their advanced classes, however.
“In our Class IV schools, what we hammer is swimmer rescue,” Collier said. “We have a rescue dummy, and we’re hammering boat spacing, boat order, leaving eddies as a team, and then we have them rescue the swimmer dummy over and over and over. They get tired of pulling them in. But if you want to boat Class IV whitewater, people fall out, and you need to be ready for it.”
McArthur said that the safety topics in their beginning rafting clinics include some introductory work with throw ropes, a flip-and-recovery day, and some swimming practice. But she emphasized that they’re just covering the basics in the rowing clinics, and they point students toward their swiftwater rescue courses, which include two- and three-day ACA Level 4 courses and a two-day Level 5 course.
Learn rafting from people who want to teach
When you’re shopping for a course, look for evidence that the course instructors aren’t just skilled river guides but also effective teachers.
“We have a curriculum that’s proven and we are always working on being better teachers,” Collier said. “For example, we have a two-day course on how to be a better teacher. We bring our instructors in to work on teaching principles. And I have an online course that our instructors go through to become better teachers and to be more aligned.”
Canyon River Institute is solely focused on river education, from rafting instruction to kayak and canoe instruction, swiftwater rescue, and professional development courses, including ACA certification programs for boaters seeking to become instructors themselves.
Acquiring river trip leadership skills
Becoming a competent rower is one thing, but how do you learn how to put a trip together and be a good leader on the river?
McArthur said they cover a good bit of leadership during their courses, and the American Canoe Association (ACA) is looking at expanding its Leader Certification Pathway program to offer leadership training for private boaters.
“It’s the kind of thing that private boaters who are leading multi-day trips really need,” she said. “Learning how to lead a trip effectively and efficiently and create an atmosphere where people say, ‘Maybe you do know what you’re talking about. Maybe I should listen to you.’ ”
Ippolito said he spends a fair amount of time coaching students through many of the aspects of river running besides rowing the boat.
“I put some focus on how to run a trip,” he said. “I talk about everything from boating etiquette and communicating with other groups to kitchen setup and choice of camps. I try to put myself in the seat of someone who’s never planned a trip. How do you teach them how to do that from the get-go?”
Ippolito said that toward the end of the clinic, he usually picks a couple of people who have shown leadership potential to become mock trip leaders for the day.
“If we’re passing a group on the last day, I have them communicate what our plans are and asking those good questions.”
Working through the scaries
One of the reasons private boaters decide to take a rafting courses is to overcome bad past whitewater experiences. McArthur said she’s seen significant transformations during clinics.
“Oftentimes we’ll get people coming to a class because they had a scary incident,” she said. “And so they’ve got that little piece of trauma that they are there to specifically work through. We pride ourselves on creating a safe space, whether that’s through our all-women courses or just through having kind, conscientious, well-trained instructors.”
That space to practice skills over and over helps diffuse the “scaries,” McArthur said.
“Although swimming a rapid can be a really terrifying thing, if you can intentionally swim a small rapid and practice these very specific maneuvers and recognize that you do know how to defensively swim through a wave train, and take breaths at the right time, and you can catch eddies with your body just like you can catch eddies with your boat—then suddenly it’s this feeling of empowerment. Most people come into these classes with the attitude that even if they are dealing with fear, they’re saying, ‘I want to learn how to do this, I want to learn how to do it properly so that I’m capable. I have the tools and the skills to get me there.’ ”
How to prepare for a rowing clinic
Get in the best shape you can. Although being in decent physical shape isn’t a requirement to take a rowing clinic, it helps with all aspects of boating.
“Boating takes some physical fitness,” said Collier. “You don’t necessarily need physical fitness to get the boat down the river, although it certainly helps. But it’s simple things like getting out of your raft on the shore, being able to walk on uneven ground or wet rocks—there’s a physical fitness element to rafting I think people don’t respect or appreciate.”
Take advantage of what’s offered. Because most private boaters will need to take vacation time to attend a rowing clinic, it might be tempting to decline the opportunity to do swim practice one more time or learn more about boat rigging in camp. Resist that urge: Every minute you get with a seasoned instructor will increase your competency and comfort level on the river.
Westbury said that she encourages students to simply observe what the instructors are doing to soak up some knowledge that will help them be good trip leaders when they’re boating with friends and family.
“I love to see them wondering what it is that the guides are doing at a certain time of day,” she said. “Why is it that they wake up 30 minutes before everyone else and they’re stretching on the boats? Why are they tying up their boat this way or anchoring it this way? Have an awareness about the instructors and use the opportunity to ask as many questions as you want.”
Be ready to surprise yourself. Ippolito recalled one of his students who had no confidence going into the clinic but ended up being one of the best in class.
“On our first day, she was nailing everything,” he said. “She said earlier that day that she didn’t think she was ready to row the boat, but she ended up being the only one who caught camp.”
Making everyone on the river safer
Investing in a rafting clinic doesn’t just raise your skill level, it makes everyone on the river safer.
McArthur said that although Canyon River Instruction sometimes gets flack from people complaining that providing education contributes to the “problem that there’s so many more people out there.” But her view is that people are going to be out there on the river anyway.
“We’re making it safer for everyone, giving information about how to do it right,” she said.
Ippolito said his experience teaching others to row raised his appreciation of river life.
“I’ve done multi-day trips in some incredible places by myself, and every time I’ve kind of sat there and looked around and said this is amazing and I’m so appreciative, but I wish I could share it with someone I know,” he said. “That’s where I get really passionate about doing a good job of getting people prepared on these trips. And most of the time it’s self-filtering. The people who want to go on a rowing clinic are the people you’re going to have a blast with on a river anyway.”
Ready to claim your spot in a rafting clinic? Looking at various programs’ course descriptions on their websites is a great start, but a conversation with the program director or instructor will be the best route to finding the course that best fits your goals. Check out the contact info above for the program leaders we talked with, or research other programs in your area. The next time you push off from the put-in, you’ll be glad you did.
