Wiver Wafting Stowies

Next Kiriban: 25,000
If you catch it take a screen cap and send it to me. I'll make you something nice!

Featured Quote:
"Okay, you see how I'm using the current? I'm not fighting it. Use the river, love the river. Make loooooove to the river. That is your lesson for today."
— Jaybird (raft guide)



June 1st, 2007

Because I didn't have time to do a whole book this year: Happy Summer!

July 9th, 2006

Rivers Don't Run in Circles: Cartoons from the 2006 Kaweah Rafting Season
Started: July 5th 2006. Finishd: July 9th 2006

As a "thank you" present to the guides who have made this rafting season so memorable to me, I am preparing a little booklet of cartoons inspired by our various exploits. Kind of like a "Leg at Each Corner" meets "The Far Side". Listed here are links to all the cartoons that will be included. It's been a lot of fun drawing them, enjoy!

• The Ten Commandments (of Rafting)
• Points of a Guide
• Points of a Customer
• Guide Launcher
• Guide vs. Trainee (part I): Key Catching
• Watch your T-grip!
• Stupid Questions
• Guide vs. Trainee (part II): Rope Flicking
• Riverside Wildlife Sightings
• "What's that rope for?"
• Guides DO Stuff
• Guide vs. Trainee (part III): Boat Throwing
• Stuffing the Rope
• Rafting Doggie
• End piece

Mind the Tree...
Thursday, June 29th 2006

For this story to make any sense I should first explain what a strainer is, and to do that, I'm just going to quote from Scott's safety speech: "A strainer is any piece of tree branch or fallen limb that is partly underwater. Usually they are only on the edges of the river where the trees or willows have grown over. Water passes through strainers, humans and boats do not. If you're in the water and you see a strainer, swim aggressively away."

Earlier this season a great branch of a sycamore fell down across the river, turning what had been a fairly relaxing stretch of water into the Strainer of Doom. Like a great clawed arm it reached out, deceptively innocent a few inches under the water. One had to maneuver one's boat into an eddy and edge around it — annoying, but manageable.

Then came our summer thunderstorms. Wind howled through, tore sign posts down, scattered leaves and branches, and sent tarps flying. And it sent a gigantic willow tree sideways into the river, like a great bushy monstrosity looming up out of the river. Water went through, not much else did. It was the Mother of All Strainers, and as luck would have it it was located not ten feet down stream from the Strainer of Doom. Now the line was dangerously narrow between the claw arm branch under water, and the looming threat of the all encompassing willow. The first time I took a boat through we snagged the tail end of the leaves, but it was no problem. Take it slow, set your line. Down get caught.

Today a fellow trainee, a girl named Taylor, guided us through that portion of river.

And I think we all learned a valuable lesson.

We went right into the Mother of All Strainers, where its copius leafy branches met the water like a green wall. Paddling was out of the question, you just had to duck.

And duck.

And keep on ducking.

Because there was always branches, and leaves, and twigs, and they were everywhere. And every time the boat hitched, or paused, you wondered if it would ever move again. People whined, screamed, pushed, and the branches pushed back. And then we were out.

Dazzled by the sudden sunlight we blearily took in the sight of our boat, which now more closely resembled a floating shrubbery, and ourselves, who looked like bizzarely dressed GI's getting ready for a camouflage mission.

"Well, that's good," Frank, who had been sitting serenely in front of Taylor said. "Now we know we can get through there."

Pump that Boat!
Saturday, June 24th 2006

We use inflatable rafts. Key word there being "inflatable" as in "big balloony thing that requires an arse-load of pumping to work properly." The Pump itself is like a great plastic nemesis to the trainee who, as the designated scape-goat of the guides, is the one who does most of the pumping. Especially if said trainee is only five foot six inches tall. It is a monstrous white plastic cylinder with six feet of heavy-duty green hose that attaches to the boat's valve. Pumping it takes two hands and all of your body and, when the air pressure in the boat is high, sometimes a jumping up and down motion to get the thing to move.

All in all it's hard, hot, sweaty work. Perhaps the least fun I've ever had around rafts, so it was always a relief to me when one of the other trainees or a guide would switch in.

Only that didn't happen today.

We had three boats and just the two of us to pump them. The two of us being myself and a guide named Jaybird whose pros are his sense of humor and the fact that he's only a hair taller than me, and whose cons are… his sense of humor and that fact he likes to rag on me all the time.

I had got done pumping one boat, and was about halfway through the next, and vaguely wondering if Jaybird planned on taking a shift, or if he was seeing how much I could take before I started complaining.

"So, do you know why I'm having you do all the pumping today?" he asked.

"Honesty — I — hadn't — thought," I gasped between pumps. It was a hot day, and we were in the sun. And my arms ached.

"It's penance," he said. "Until you can pull yourself into the raft as fast as I can, you're pumping up all the boats."

For the record, it takes Jaybird about 3 to 5 seconds to get into the boat. It takes me around 30.

"Ah, incentive!" I said, rubbing a blister that was forming on my hand.

"Yeah, right on," he said, grinning ear to ear. "C'mon, last boat."

"I think you under estimate my enjoyment of pumping," I said, grimly hauling the pump over.

Jay-FLYING-bird
Friday, June 23rd 2006

The best story from this day cannot be told just in words. Fortunately, I drew a picture that pretty much covers it. (Read the whole description for the rest of the story.)

Welcome to Disney Land — NOT!
Monday, June 19th 2006

The boat wasn't moving.

Well, technically it was, because it was rocking back and forth and every ten seconds or so it would kick forward and try to flip over, but it wasn't floating serenely down stream like it should have been.

This was because we were stuck in a whitewater hole. It is a place in the river where the water will flow over a rock and then boil back on itself — actually flowing up stream faster than in flows down stream. In that small place where the boiling up stream water meets the rushing down stream water, a "hole" is created. It doesn't look much like a hole, in fact, it looks more like a crashing breaker wave at the beach, or as one customer put it: "a great flipping big water thing!"

Holes come in all sizes, from tiny ones you float right over, to huge ones that will literally grab a raft and then chew it to shreds. We were caught in a medium small hole, and we were surfing; riding the boiling water up stream before getting pushing back, and then pushed back up again.

Surfing can be fun, if you do it on purpose and there's a nice pool down river to swim into. This was not one of those cases. There was a six foot waterfall down stream, and we were not there on purpose.

The water had caught us, pushed us up, then the incoming water filled the lower side of the boat and tried to flip it, but by the grace of god (or perhaps our guide, Scott, who was hanging off the high-side) we didn't.

"I wanna get out! I wanna get OUT!" A woman screamed. She was hunched on the low side, unable to move, her weight keeping us pinned in the hole.

"Get to the high side and PADDLE!" Scott yelled, throwing one of the boys across the boat with one arm. I braced my feet against the lower side tube of the raft and tried to pull us out. No sooner had I got in a few good strokes then the nose of the raft was grabbed, and the whole thing spun 180°. I had to hop quickly to avoid being sucked out as water rushed in where I had been sitting moments before.

"Get us out! Get us OUT!" The woman screamed. She had dropped her paddle and seemed to have forgotten that, while Scott is over six feet tall and very, very strong, he is no match for the river. The river is stronger than all of us, and if you think you're above it it'll just drag you under.

Using the river, on the other hand, is fine. Hopping to the bow of the raft I was able to reach out and dig my paddle into a through current. There was some violent shoving from the rear of the boat as Scott proved that, while he wasn't as strong as the river, he was still strong enough to lift a 300 lbs. raft with people in it out of a whitewater hole using only a flimsy plastic paddle.

"Nice surf," I said, once we were safely in the eddy.

"It kept us good," Scott agreed.

"I wanna get out now," the woman said.

"I told you, this isn't Disney Land," Scott grinned.

And that is my river story for today.

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Index
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July 27th, 2007

Lessons Learned on the American and Truckee rivers.

June 2nd, 2007

Ever wonder what it wold be like to go rafting in the middle of the night on a full moon?

Click here to find out!

~Æ signing out.