White Water Drowning Trip

Sunday I went with a couple of carpenter friends on a white water trip up the top of the Rogue River. This is where you find the class 3 and 4 rapids, and where, if you're not careful, you become a river statistic and food for the steelhead.

And I discovered this about 100 feet into the trip, encountering a drowning river trip buddy stuck on the downside of a large boulder in a rather dire predicament. You see, he was being sucked under the water and upstream into the rock with about as much force as his life jacket had to keep his head at the surface.

In other words he was trapped by a dangerous "hole" and was about thirty seconds away from drowning.

Backing up a few days, I got a call from my friend Charles who asked if I wanted to go River kayaking down the rogue. Now the last time I did that was about ten years ago, and we went on the lower mellower section of the rogue, and I got sunburned on my nose and we had a great day. I even wrote about the trip here, and Charles and I had a laugh recalling Jonny D. and her rather large backside....

So I said "It sounds like fun" and my friend "Jesus On A Piece Of Toast" (who is from Idaho and has run many a river in large boats there and who bought a white water inflatable kayak off of a mutual friend who was moving) asked "Can I go?" and the fourth man on this trip was Charles' friend Stuart, who owned three of the boats and had lots of experience on white water as he winters in Honduras every year with his white water boat and lots of rivers down there.

The thing is, Stuart thought we all had more experience than we did, and we all thought we were going on a floaty floaty down the rogue river...

There was definitely a lack of communication that morning, and if it weren't for the fact that I'm stronger than you, things would have turned out badly for ol' Jesus On A Piece Of Toast...

(to be continued...)

(What can I say, I gotta be at work in twenty minutes!)