Well, I guess its time to write something… I rather dread doing so for several reasons. I blew a pretty serious move paddling and ended up a) swimming a strainer, b) badly pinning a boat, and c)requiring the efforts of my paddling friends and a stranger from the campground to undo the mess I’d gotten myself in. These are not things one should be proud of. (And I don’t want to let this post turn into a novella - its not that interesting a story.)
The other side of the coin though, is that if we paddle long enough every one of us will miss a move, though usually where the chances of a bad outcome are less than this. I’ve paddled rivers for over 50 years now and never pinned a boat or swum a serious strainer until now. But I made up for it this time. Hopefully there are a few “take-aways” from this that might help others - though the “take-aways” are also things we probably all know already and have practiced habitually for some time. I usually did, too.
It was an absolutely beautiful sunny day with the occasional puff of cool breeze. The river was running a bit high, but not as high as I’ve done on it three times before. There we chutes with delightful standing waves and we’d already run a bunch of them, all without taking even a small splash in the Royalex Prospector I was soloing. We’d stopped for lunch and a relaxing stretch out on a gravel bar in the warm sun. Marty and I were bringing up the rear on a long pool, talking about various sorts of paddles we liked and generally enjoying the bluffs and terrific scenery of the Buffalo. We came upon yet another gravel bar with a chute of fast water running into an undercut bank and a shallow, though pretty long, spill-over at the tip of it. It was something to be taken single file, though. He in his Wildfire went ahead, I drifted in about 10 ft behind him. As we dropped through the chute, I guess I caught a bit faster current than he and kept catching up, so I back paddled a bit to try to maintain distance. As we dropped through, though he was paddling steadily, I kept slowly gaining on him and working slightly to the right into quite a fast current, which I could now see was going directly into a strainer. It was about maybe seven or eight boat lengths downstream but had a nice channel maybe 15 feet wide on the left of the tip of the strainer. Nothing tricky or even unusual, but I still wanted to put more distance between us. Well, what do we do when we want to slow down and move laterally? Yes, we set the angle and back ferry. So I did. The distance between us increased, sure enough, but the lateral move just wasn’t happening. Apparently the spill over from the gravel bar was negating that. So bring her around and power past the strainer. I didn’t accelerate fast enough. One more good stroke and I’d have hit the stern on an upstream-leaning branch coming out of a large (20" dia. or so) submerged branch of the tree. Two strokes and I’d have cleared it all. But I didn’t. The lesson - separate more before entering a chute.
The branch caught the gunnal before the hull hit the submerged branch and dumped me upstream. I clung with my chin and hands on the submerged gunnal for a bit, trying to scissor and then flutter kick to climb over, but my head was about 18" under at that point and my efforts didn’t begin to help me gain anything against the very strong current. So I stretched out my arms and went under the canoe and log trying to keep my feet high to avoid snagging anything that might be at depth, an easy task in a current that fast. Like a flag standing straight in the wind. I’m happy to report that the water was refreshingly warm, at least that wasn’t an issue… I can report that it was dark about three feet down. I let go, as I knew I’d have to while I still had breath in me and surfaced shortly below the log where I was able to reach up and grab a 1/2" or so trig that held. I floated there with the current ripping loudly by till I caught my breath again. I was able to reach my very nice Sawyer Freestyle paddle which was caught in twigs a bit to my left and toss it out into the clear channel where folks downstream stood a chance of recovering it. From my vantage point I could see a path downstream clear of overhanging branches, though what was under the surface was a mystery. I know that folks downstream would have had a hard time seeing me where I was, that I was in fact able to breathe and get my bearings, and that a pretty long time had passed. They would by now be getting pretty concerned. I’m sorry for that but there was nothing much I could do about it. Marty, God bless him, appeared on the gravel bar with a throw rope, I waved, he saw me. I let go and he tossed when I cleared the brush. That’s that part of the story. The rest is boat recovery.
Pete had the Z-drag. We ferried across to the right bank where we found a landing point downstream and behind the strainer. Standing on the stump of the strainer (deep and fast underneath) I was able to snag my floating painter with a paddle handle and we tied on to it. We rigged the 3:1 Z-drag (Pete is very expert in this - and he had the foresight to rig it in such a way that if a rope broke it wouldn’t snap us in the face.) That was fortunate because the painter did, in fact, break. I had not ever imagined that I would ever have to put that much tension on a painter. That’s another “take-away” - use a 3/8" or better floating painter in good condition, you never know when something that strong may be required. We were able to again reattach to the grab loop, which we could barely reach (though tying to a thwart would have been better if it had been possible without going in the drink.) by duct-taping a large spring biener, (with a strap and finally the haul rope) to a paddle, reaching out, clipping onto the grab loop and pulling the paddle back till the tape let go. And then we (Pete, Marty and I - and later Tom - bless 'em all) hauled. And hauled. Moved the boat, open side upstream and catching a sizable portion of the Buffalo River’s total flow, about three or four feet toward shore. If one doubts how hard it was stuck, it did this:
We finally bagged it for the day and I paddled bow with Pete and Gen about a mile and a half downstream back to our camp.
This is turning into the novella I was hoping to avoid… I’ll continue the saga if anyone is interested and asks. There is the part about lowering two canoes down the cliff from the scenic overlook we discovered this all happened under, the heaven sent local with the chain saw, a word about the importance of having a spare key to your car door in your PFD pocket, the serendipity of rhow (a Pnetter, an original 'Vous paddler, who paddled many times with me on the Currrent, Wisconsin, Kickapoo, Upper Iowa) showing up just to say “hi”, and and other such incredible stuff.
But, as you can see, this all has very little to do with the paddling trip itself - it was a great river trip with beautiful weather and a fine time for all the others (and in spite of it all, I don’t regret going either…) - that’s the story that really matters. This is a lovely bucket-list river for all those river paddlers who haven’t yet experienced it.
I think it safe to say there were a greater than usual number of “out of boat experiences” this time.
