Two Broken Paddles
This was one of those weekends that was destined for misadventure from the start. A group of us gathered Saturday morning at the takeout for The Gorge, the lower Class III run on the South Fork American. Upon meeting, one person in the group reported that he had become afflicted with some illness, probably food poisoning, and that he had already thrown up twice on the drive up. He said that if he had a good book, that he'd just hang out and not paddle, but since he didn't he was up for coming along.
Fortunately, after putting on the river, he was feeling better. Unfortunately, shortly after putting on, his paddle broke. I looked over to see him holding a blade in each hand, paddling around. I thought he was just hotdogging with two pieces of a take-apart paddle, but nope, the paddle had snapped right in his hands.
The rest of us headed down to Barking Dog, a nice little play spot, while he made his way over to the local kayak shop to rent a paddle. He met us about an hour later and we were on our way. The rest of the day was fun and uneventful, and we took off the water around 8 pm.
Sunday morning we met up again to run Chili Bar, the upper Class III run. As we approached Meatgrinder, the first major rapid of the run, we saw a bunch of rafts pulled to the side. One of the guides was waving us over, signaling that two rafts were wrapped on the rocks below. We hung out in the eddy until the wrapped rafts were taken care of. However, during a moment of inattention, I let the small current grab my boat and flip it over. With rocks on one side and a raft on the other, I figured there wasn't room to roll. I reached up with my hands and was able to grab the raft and pull myself up, but I ended up letting go of my paddle in the process. I looked around and the paddle was nowhere to be seen. After a few minutes of frantic looking around, someone in our group spotted it under the raft. Whew.
The rest of the Chili Bar run went well, and the day was just beautiful. The air was not too hot, and the water was not too cold. After that, we continued down the Class II stretch to hit a couple more play spots on our way to the takeout. The water level was dropping, and we had to get the rental paddle back before the shop closed, so we started paddling with purpose. But when we got to Barking Dog again, we found it was still going, so we thought we'd hang out there for a bit.
I surfed the wave a few times. On about my third attempt, I came off the back of the wave and went to plant a stroke when my paddle knicked a rock. Suddenly I notice my right blade is missing! Thankfully, all that practice of paddling on one side paid off, and I made it back to the eddy.
Since we were kind of in a hurry, paddling the final 3 miles with one blade wasn't an option, nor was using the hand paddles someone brought. So out of the 4 of us, 2 people paddled down to the end to get the cars, while the 2 of us with broken paddles took out at Camp Lotus, just above Barking Dog. The other "broken paddler" ran his paddle back to the kayak shop, and afterward we were able to talk the people at the camp store into taking an IOU for a couple beers until the rest of the group arrived with money. At least we were able to drown our sorrows!
