Opportunity perhaps, but didn’t happen
The opportunities to jet-ferry, as would be possible if parked in an eddy and needing to cross an adjacent zone of rapid flow, may indeed have been present here and there, but the OP's boat never ended up in such places so the point remains moot. Even if he had encountered that situation the point would still be moot since he wouldn't have been able to execute the maneuver at his skill level, even with a more-suitable boat (what's more, any person who already knows how to do this would be perfectly able to make it happen in "the wrong boat" - he/she would just be less comfortable while doing so).
We know he didn't get into situations suitable for a jet-ferry because with all the emphasis he put on telling us how he was unable to make good progress paddling upstream, it's a pretty sure thing he didn't forget to tell us how he lost control and his boat was spun end for end, or that he got the feeling while in his boat that was just as if someone had yanked a rug out from under his feet. No, I don't think he forgot to tell us those things. These things didn't happen, and the main detail of his story is pretty much as he described. In that case, the really basic means of getting to shore which have been mentioned, methods requiring no special boat and no edging, would have been quite sufficient.
Oh, by the way, for general ferrying when NOT in a situation where the boat has not just entered a new zone of current of different velocity, edging is pointless (seems I've said that before, and to simply say otherwise rather than suggesting a reason why gets us nowhere). The boat can't tell that it's drifting with a steady current as you paddle, anymore than you can feel a force applied to your body when riding at steady velocity in a car or bus. You can walk from one side of a bus to the other as it cruises down a straight stretch of highway without bracing yourself against the forward motion that it gives you, but look how far down the highway you went as you made that crosswise trip! Your boat crossing the river does the same thing, but the additive effect of the current is much less dramatic because its speed is so much less. You can paddle at any angle across a huge river, whether that angle constitutes ferrying or not, and if all you could see was the water flowing by your hull, you'd have no idea which way the current was going (just like looking at the floor of the bus as you walk around in various directions as it cruises along. And don't be confused by lurching and velocity changes of the bus and how that affects your footing and the need to brace yourself. That's sort of like turbulence in a river, which can complicate things but doesn't affect the basic principle going on here). Same goes for if you were to drop a series of floating markers behind you and you looked back at them (they'd form a straight line directly behind your boat regardless of your heading relative to the direction of the current). These examples illustrate the straight-line travel of your boat through the water that supports it, regardless of whether that water happens to be moving as well, and regardless of the direction of that motion. You can observe this with the contrails of airliners too as they pass overhead in extremely strong crosswinds (the plane and the contrail both drift sideways together, indicating that even though the plane has a sideways component to its motion relative to the ground, it has no sideways component relative to the air that supports it).
This is that issue of frame of reference and relative motion again. It can be explained without examples, mathematically, but without starting a "book" along those lines, I'll suggest some additional food for thought. Consider the fact that if a boat's handling were affected in some discernible way as it moves through the water when there's steady current, why is it completely impossible for mariners on the ocean to detect current AT ALL until such time as they chart their progress by means of the sun and stars to find out what their course and speed have really been (or nowadays, by seeing what the GPS says about their true speed and direction of travel relative to their measured speed through the water and their compass heading)? Once you understand why this is so, you will understand what I've been trying to explain. I once knew an excellent physics teacher who had an absolutely superb method for illustrating this, but I can't get my chalk board onto P-net.
So put yourself on a really wide river and ONLY look down at the water as you paddle, and try to see a difference in what the water does as it goes by your boat and try to feel any difference, while you paddle at various headings.
