Locked down canoe problem?

Here’s one that was totally new to me.

I have never seen this before, am not an expert canoer but i have a feeling i am not the first.
Kettle River, MN on a class 3 rapids, cascading layers of bedrock with about 6" to a foot of water, we flipped the canoe upside down and held on as we went down the cascade. About two thirds down the cascade, the canoe stopped on a shelf of rock, upside down, full of water, sideways with the water rushing against & around but not over the canoe. It must have weighed >1000 lbs full of water. We could not get it up high enough to get air under the edge. Every time we were able to lift it on the downstream side a couple of inches, it would move downstream, trapped my hands once (injured) and my feet once (injured). We cracked a paddle trying to lever it with both paddles.

Miles from civilization, it was a fix. It was like taking an IQ test that i was not smart enough to pass. I have never seen water lock a canoe down, upside down, immovable.

Our final successful attempt was to jam a large but liftable flat rock under it and kind of use it as a lever. I think we were really lucky.

Have more experienced canoers see this before?

Is there a recommended approach to the problem from freeing the canoe?

Yep. I’d hazard to say it happens to every canoeist at some point in their career. You’re lucky the boat was still usable, and hopefully learned a lesson about the power of water. Its one reason to put flotation bags inside the canoe.

I have seen boats get pinned in many different ways. They get stuffed into undercut rocks and held there by the force of the current, caught in strainers under tree trunks or hung up in branches, pinned on rocks, and in big, powerful rapids boats have been known to disappear under the water never to be seen again.

When canoes pin on rocks the typical scenario is a midships broach or a double end pin. With a double end pin the bow and stern are both pinned on rocks, or one end pinned on a rock and the other against the bank. Every situation is different and the “best” way to free a pinned boat will depend on many factors such as manpower available, equipment on hand, whether or not you can easily get to the boat to attach a line, where you might be able to stand to haul on a line, and the availability of anchor points to set up mechanical drag systems if necessary. There are many different strategies that might be used to free a pinned boat, but strategies have to be tailored to the particulars of the situation. If you have an interest, consider taking some swift water rescue training.

Many or most times, freeing a pinned canoe is going to require getting one or more lines anchored to some solid attachment points on the boat. As a general rule, unpinning the boat is going to require some combination of force applied in an upstream direction, force applied in a lateral direction, and/or a rotational force. As you found, swamped boats are very heavy, and if the current is strong, a mechanical drag system such as a Z-drag, or a mechanical device such as a “come-along” winch might be required to move the boat. When a lot of force is required, attachment points such as thwarts are often easily torn out.

If you want to run Class III water in an open boat, you really should have supplemental flotation in the boat. This means float bags, inner tubes, foam blocks, etc, and it needs to be securely anchored in the hull so that it does not come out. The inherent buoyancy of most canoes is really pretty minimal when they are fully soused. Supplemental flotation will not absolutely prevent a pin, but will reduce the likelihood considerably.

“If you want to run Class III water in an open boat, you really should have supplemental flotation in the boat. This means float bags, inner tubes, foam blocks, etc, and it needs to be securely anchored in the hull so that it does not come out. The inherent buoyancy of most canoes is really pretty minimal when they are fully soused. Supplemental flotation will not absolutely prevent a pin, but will reduce the likelihood considerably.”

I am inexperienced enough that his is completely new to me and makes a lot of sense. The physics of it was straight forward. No wedging or pinning. Simply a canoe upside down full of water in 6" of water. The weight of the water in the canoe above the water line was huge.

My son suggested filling a water bottle with air, lifting a little, squirt the air in, fill again… which seemed impossibly slow. It occurs to me now that I might have used the hoses from our Camelbak water bladders to blow air under, but they were on the other side of an angry river.

The fact that we were eventually able to wedge a flat rock under to help lever it then adrenalin lift the upstream side enough to enable the river flow to help is a clue. If we had flotation bladders or styrofoam under the seats it might have made all the difference in what seemed impossible situation at the time.

Thanks both AMF and Pblanc for the insights.

Sounds like you didn’t raise that downstream gunwale much…

@BigSpencer said:
Sounds like you didn’t raise that downstream gunwale much…

Yeah, and he explained exactly why and what happened when he tried. With the whole interior of the boat flooded and being inverted, and mostly above the level of the river, a tandem canoe would weigh in excess of a ton, so just how WOULD you lift that gunwale above the water level without tools providing mechanical advantage? (to clarify, this is a large-scale example of the grade-school science demonstration of lifting a glass that’s full of water up out of the sink, bottom end first)

I have never seen the scenario as described either.

My preferred method of emptying a completely flooded canoe when two people are available is very often to get the boat to the shallows and leave the flooded canoe in the water, roll it over inverted, then lift it out of the water from near the stems allowing the water to drain out as the boat is lifted free. I have done this many, may times. When you do this, as water drains there is a suction effect created by the air remaining in the inverted hull, now at sub-atmospheric pressure, that can hold a certain amount of water in the hull and make it a bit difficult to lift until the suction is broken, usually by rotating one or the other gunwales upward.

The same thing can occur with a boat-over-boat rescue in which the inverted canoe is pulled up and over the gunwales of the rescue canoe allowing it to drain as the boat is lifted. In this case, the suction affect can often most easily be broken by one of the swimmers going to the stem of the flooded boat opposite the rescue canoe and pressing it down, and sometimes helping the rescuer rotate it a bit to break the suction.

But in either case, I have never seen this suction effect capable of holding many hundreds of pounds of water in the inverted boat above the water level of the lake/stream, and the suction can usually fairly easily be broken without a big struggle. If that did happen, neither of these methods would work. I have to believe some other mechanism was at work here.

Agreed pblanc,
I must’ve misunderstood the OP’s description = obvious pinning via a wedged formation of rock, not a slab = flat…
Think we can also add to the OP’s description…some weed/dope…y/n? I mean who would choose that line… :neutral:

Just curious - was this the Blueberry Slide rapid on the Kettle River?

Kona asked “Just curious - was this the Blueberry Slide rapid on the Kettle River?”

No, it was down river farther below Sandstone. I think it is called Big Spring Falls, on the east side of the island. On the west side of the island is a class IV but on the east side there are few boulders and wide flat bedrock shelves. The irony here is that is a 20 foot portage over a rock wall on the west, but my son was certain he wanted to try it. I saw little risk

One last unexpected item of information, for anyone in similar conundrum finding this with Google: I had expected it easier to lift the canoe from the down riverside (it was crossways and locked down solid to the rock shelf) because the water was flowing against the boat on the upriver side making the lift even higher, at least a foot to 1.5’. And we could not get it up more than 4 inches. But part of the solution was to lift the canoe from the upriver side. There was something about the force of the water working in our favor and helping us when we finally lifted it high enough.

The other big assist was fear. The prospect of walking out of the park, leaving the canoe in the river, was absolutely inspirational to my adrenal glands.

It seems to me that 1 meter of hose would have been incredibly useful. One end of the hose would be inside the boat at the highest point (or at least above the level of the water surface outside the boat). The other end would be outside the boat, above the water surface.

To start the emptying, you would only need one short blow of air into the hose. This would empty any water out of the hose. After that, the vacuum inside the boat would keep the air running, and the boat would empty itself.

while I won’t pretend that I can conceptualize the scenario I think of freeing boats in terms of movement. How can I get the boat to move? Usually it involves some strong arming in the direction of flow, often on the most upstream end of the boat and often in an upward direction. All pins are different but that’s usually where I start.

The hose idea might have worked on a dory I saw pinned on the roaring fork in colorado. Filled to the gills it looked to me that the best course of action was to wait until the water dropped, then bail the boat out before trying to extract it with ropes. To the rescuers credit they did have someone upstream telling us to take the clear left channel, well away from their ropes and the sunken dory.