Mission: Loosing is often winning, the rescue And PG 13 required!

Mission: Loosing is often winning, the rescue And PG 13 required.

As a kayak intructor one might think that students getting their butts served to them on a silver platter cordially offered by yours truly would be a bad thing but it was a perfect day…. I remember looking up the river at a series of 25 footers, 10, 8’s, 16’s and more thinking these guys have their hands full today and they did and they… didn’t…. Wayne, Louis, Leah were running the very edge of what they could do and did most of it in style…. We have been going hard, maybe too hard the last 5 days running rivers pretty constantly…. Louis from CDB was the first to break, he broke his paddle at the bigger drop, managed to roll up, Wayne decided to have a creek-boat rodeo in a small but powerful little hole…. As usual looking back upstream at the girl or even the cascading montage of crystal blue water and its raw power…. Leah took a swim about 3 more drops down in a powerful river wide ledge only a big set of arms could propel you over with. Exhausted she carried on, the next rapid Louis turn…. Louis got dragged into boulder hell at high speed and was forced to pull the pin just above another 16 footer…. The bag found its mark and pendulumed him in just above the next falls and his boat tore down stream and got caught in a sive thankfully on the immediate right, within our reach and on our side of the river…. Louis safe and sound, Leah broke out after me hit her boof early and ended up in the curtain of the 16 footer…. Her boat is still behind the curtain as I type this and actually I have to go back and get it right now…… TBC.

Ok, I could only take a couple people so as not to make a gong show at the waterfall…. I got Christo(ropes), Lenny(power), Kurt(river sage), and the Frenchman all down to the waterfall…. Christo set up the ropes with Lenny, Louis and Kurt sorted out the Inflatable and the plan was to go on line paddle me into the waterfall curtain at its weak spot and pull the boat out of the curtain Kurt on power me on the bow grab at the front of the raft…..

We couldn’t see the kayak but it was there and we all knew it…. Kurt while scampering about found a little hole behind the waterfall and peered in……. He called me over and said, “ you can get in there”…. I managed to crawl through it Kurt holding me via rope, just between the curtain into the room behind the drop…. I Crawled about 20 feet Kurt feeding me line just in case the Curtain caught me…. I came around the bend just out of sight and there was the boat…. I cracked out our preplan whistle and the boys hauled it out and we were back in Business.

I took a shot of the rescue team all mooning the camera that was in the back of leah’s boat and left it on her camera…. I would show you, but someone, not naming names (starts with chris and ends with toe) might have mooned a bit too much rear end for the interweb to be seeing………. Happy times, good beer great company and fantastic paddling….

Havin a mission