Okawa is the only student whitewater kayaking association in the Netherlands that has whitewater as its primary discipline, says Chiel Ton, now a PhD candidate at Electrical Engineering. He has been a member of Okawa for ten years and is now also an assistant instructor. “We don’t consist of a collection of teams, like you see in a soccer association. And kayaking is not a solo sport, as many people believe. No – because we kayak on whitewater, we’re a very close-knit group. You’re often in the middle of nowhere, so you need to keep an eye on each other. You’re seriously responsible for one another’s safety.”

First, Ton shares a fun fact about Okawa members. “We’re all a little bonkers, seeing as we chose to join an association for kayaking on whitewater in the as-flat-as-it-gets Netherlands.” Whitewater can be found in the Ardennes, the Eifel, the Pyrenees, and Slovenia, and Okawa has explored basically every corner of the Alps as well. They also went to Uganda once, but that is now a thing of the past. There are vague plans for the Zambezi, the Grand Canyon, or Norway, “but those are still just dreams”.

Their favorite number is 80 because that’s an ideal water level on the gauge in Monschau, in the Eifel region. That is when the Rur, a rain-fed river in that region, turns into a “roaring stream”, according to Ton. “Many Okawa members get very excited about that and then start wondering whether the lecture they’re supposed to be attending that day is really more important than kayaking on the Rur.”