Paddling Again

Yesterday I had an adventure paddling the Caney Fork. The river felt like one of the more demanding rivers I've been on. Even after walking the one class V, many of the remaining rapids had lines I didn't find particularly obvious. Further, a lot of the rapids couldn't be scouted in their entirety from a boat. Given the length of the river, the amount of daylight, and the rocky banks, getting out to scout every rapid wasn't an option. One member of our party who had paddled the river before assured us that most lines were runnable and that there were few serious consequences. He was mostly right.

A little more than halfway down we come up to a rapid whose entrance consists of a bunch of horizon lines. The strongest paddler in our party proceeds along a far left line. We see him drop off the ledge out of view. An instant later we see just the nose of his boat pointing straight up. A moment later we hear a whoop as he paddles out of the hydraulic. The three of us still in the pool at the top look at each other and decide to find a different line. At far river-right there is a channel of water that flows between two rocks maybe six feet apart and then makes an abrupt left turn into a V-shaped, four foot drop.  We have a better view of the line, but there isn't much room to maneuver. The next guy runs it and makes it.  The third guy enters the channel, but can't quite turn his boat to the left far enough, goes off the drop sideways, flips, gets pushed up against a rock wall and swims. He makes it to a rock in a relatively calm part of the rapid. The first guy throws him a rope, and he manages to get to shore. I get out of my boat, go down to see how everyone is, take a look back upstream and see how to run the rapid. Once everyone is OK, I walk back to my boat, get in and run the line I picked out. At the end of the rapid I paddle directly over a boat pinned against a rock underwater. The muted blue shape under a layer of water is the boat belonging to the guy who swam.

The boat is too far out into the current to reach, and efforts to throw a rope around it aren't working. I cross the river, someone throws a rope across the river to me, and we manage to get the rope snagged under the downstream edge of the boat. We make several concerted efforts to pull the boat free and it doesn't even budge. I suggest setting up a Z-drag, but the sun is already heading toward the edge of the canyon. The guy who swam decides to walk. It's miles to the nearest road. So now there's three of us.  The guy who really knows the river is bushwhacking through the forest. 

Two more paddlers show up and we ask if we can paddle the rest of the river with them. They say sure. Aside from being excellent boaters, they're really nice guys and proceed to guide us down the rest of the river. They pick excellent line, make it look easy, and we follow. We get to the car at the takeout just as the guy who walked out comes strolling along. The sun goes down less than a half hour later.

Everything turned out OK, so I suppose that made it a good adventure, but I can't help but wonder how things would have turned out had we not met up with the boaters we did.