"Ewan Scott" wrote in message
...
The reason I don't like to grade it is because someone else will always
say "oh but I've run that
and it's not that hard", and then people start paying attention to such
idiots. I prefer to think of it as runnable but hard and dangerous.


Ah. There you have the crux of the difficulty of paddling.

We do need to encourage people to push their envelope, but we need to
be very careful not to draw people into water grades and experiences
that they are not mentally ready for.

Agreed - that is where the gradings are much more useful than has been
suggested here. Many people have a tendency to downgrade rapids because
they found them easy or because they have only ever paddled it at low levels
(thereby giving an invalid grading). But experienced paddlers will go back
to the original definitions of the gradings and find that actually there is
much less scope for differences of opinion than has been suggested. A good
coach will take such information along with knowledge of the paddler to
produce the desired experience.