I was upside down in a raft once. Being a bright boy I quickly realized this wasn’t a pleasant place to be.
The “Rock Creek Incident” occurred the first time I rowed a raft. It was a fine spring day and we had decided a float on Rock Creek seemed like a good idea. It might have been if we’d had a clue, but I was only slightly less experienced than the rest of the folks in the boat that day, including the raft’s owner, a dentist who’d just started floating.
Mistake No. 1 was a bunch of rookies floating this tricky piece of water. Mistake No. 2 was going way up the drainage, to where Skalkaho Highway drops down the east flank of the Sapphires. Rock Creek is a boney piece of water that high.
Mistake No. 3 was putting me behind the oars for the first time in my life in a situation such as this. I was clueless how to handle a boat, but I’d been watching folks float Montana rivers and it looked pretty cool. I was jazzed to get a shot at the oars.
That was until we cleared a bend and came upon a river obstacle I now know to be a sweeper. The fallen log was suspended a foot or so above the water, and reached nearly halfway across the stream. There was room to go around, but the maneuver would have required rowing skills I hadn’t developed in the 15 minutes I’d been at this. So instead, with just a brief comment about bouncing off the log from the dentist behind me, we floated right into that sweeper. Sideways.
The most shocking thing about what happened next was the speed with which things went wrong. Needless to say, the boat didn’t “bounce” off the log. We hit it, stuck, and then in an instant, the current grabbed the upstream tube and pulled it under, flipping the boat and sending all four passengers into the drink.
The current flushed the raft out into the shallow pool below the sweeper, but only three of us came up beside the boat. The dentist screamed for his son, then 7 or 8. I went back under water where I saw the feet of the youngster hanging below the raft. He had popped to the surface in the air pocket inside the raft. I grabbed the kid by his PFD (he was the only one wearing one) and pulled him out.
We flipped the raft and began to assess the damage. The kid had a bloody nose, apparently because his face hit the raft frame when I hastily yanked him out from under the boat. We also had a broken rod tip, and the Velcro failed on one of my Tevas and I was down to a single river sandal. More importantly, we’d all had one of those life-altering experiences that forever changed how casually we’d approach the water.
Fortunately, we all came out unharmed. But we all knew how easily things could have turned tragic that day.
The truth is, that wasn’t the only time I was ever upside down in a boat. It was just the only time I was upside down by accident. Fast-forward a decade from my Rock Creek fiasco and I decided it was time to finally learn something about how to handle a raft in difficult water. I signed up for a whitewater training course with one of the rafting outfits in Gardner. Just downstream from Yankee Jim Canyon on the Yellowstone, our instructor had us clumsily plow the boat into an eddy line, flipping the raft so we could practice putting it right side up and recovering swimmers.
Training. Preparation. Experience. They are good things.
It’s high-water season in Montana so this is no time for beginners such as my former self to be floating rivers. As for my current self, I know a lot more now, enough to know that I have no business floating rivers higher than my skill level can handle. For the time being, I’m headed to Rogers Lake.
To paraphrase Merle Haggard, I may drown in still waters, but I won’t float muddy rivers again, at least until the water subsides.