Well, through a stupid mistake I nearly offed myself today [View All]

[eyepaddle]

At high water two sets of rapids (mother's delight and dragon's tooth) blend together, you stay in the middle through mother's delight (to avoid rocks that jut into to the river from the banks) but once through that head to the left NOW to avoid "The Tooth." The tooth is a large rock in the middle of the channel, and because of how it affects water flow feeds boats (and swimmer's) into the right wal--which is severly undercut. This means you can be swept under water and trapped under the wall, and thus drown.

As ghastly as that sounds, it isn't much of a problem--it is simple to head to the left and there is a ten or fifteen foot clear path around the "complications."

Except I stupidly lost trck of where I was--I thought I had one more ledge in Mother's delight to clear before making my move to the left. As it turns out, I didn't. I got caught in the trash around Dragon's tooth and flipped. Realizing where I was I knew I didn't have long to screw around getting myself sorted out. I took one hurried shot at rolling up, missed and bailed out; usually that is just a blow to one's pride, now I was worried (for the first time since I've been kayaking) about drowning.

Holy shit, I din't know I could swim that hard. At least my sense of direction is pretty rock solid, I swam so hard for the safe "bank" (really a ten foot rock wall) I managed to get out of the trash. My friends who had run the tooth cleanly collected my boat at the bottom and had it dumpe out and waiting for me when I hiked up. It was my only screw-up today, but boy howdy, ir was a doozy. The rest of the river was run without incident.

Here's where I swam: