River surfers take ride on 'Champlain wave'
Canada Dot Com
'The first time Chris Mosher tried to surf on the Ottawa River, he had to quit early.
Not because of fear or inability - he has six years of experience surfing the Pacific Ocean off Vancouver Island - but because of that pesky, seemingly endless thing called Canadian winter.
"I was just about to get in the water, and I guess a big sheet of ice had broken upstream, and chunks of ice starting flowing through the wave," says Mr. Mosher, who was nevertheless back at Bate Island Thursday for another try.
It's the Catch-22 of surfing in Ottawa: although land-lubbers enjoyed 20-degree weather on Thursday, the water temperature hovered dangerously close to freezing. And ice chunks lined the river at the Champlain Bridge, where three standing waves are the raison d'être for avid surfers in Ottawa...'
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