I'm going to try something different for each day of this trip. At least until I run out of ideas.
This is our second day of the trip and the first real river run of the week. We decide to run the Fractions section of the Arkansas. Unfortunately, we can't seem to find any real informaiton on the rapids. But Todd and Renee did this section last year. Of course it was at a noticeably higher level. In fact when we get to the put-in, they comment that last year they put in about 10 feet further up the slope. They also mention that the rock out in the center of the river was under water.
We put on the river. Todd leads, Renee follows and I sweep. We are all just getting familiar with our boats, but the river doesn't care about that. It starts off with a pretty much continuous class 3/3+ read and react for at least a mile. At some point, Renee catches an eddy in the middle of the river, it looked very impresssive, until I catch up to her and find out she didn't exactly do it on purpose. I catch another eddy further down stream to wait for her. Todd is so intent on finding the next path, that he never even realizes that we had fallen behind. We manage to catch up to him though.
There is a ton of small catch and release waves along the way. But, I am still not fully comfortable in my boat and neither are Renee and Todd. Renee wishes she'd paddled her SuperHero a few times recently to get back in the flow. Todd feels the new Fun design has much less rocker, and is constantly try to keep the nose of his boat out of the water. Of course their isn't much rear to his boat either. Talk about lack of rear, the new SuperStar design has none.
After several miles of this, I see a black and white sign on the river left bank. It says "entrapment hazzard on river right". If impassible, portage on river left. I look at the river left bank. Some idiot local land owner thought it would be a great idea to line the entire left shoreline with barbed wire. So much for porting on the left. It turned out that the river left line wasn't that bad. There was a steep spill over on river right and a slot further right (I assume where the entrapment could occur), but the left line through the rapid was straight forward.
The scenery is amazing, with snow capped mountains in the background. I managed to get a few shots. I think Todd got more though.
By the time we stop for Todd to eat a snack bar, we are all getting much more comfortable in our boats. I'm even catching some surfing along the way.
The last notable rapid was School House Rock (It was not the same at the Lower Yough rapid of the same name). There was a massive hole on the river left side of the rock. The far river right side had an undercut. The usual line is to run right of the rock pointed left and driving left away from the undercut. Renee went first, cause Todd had caught an eddy and Renee missed it. Renee ran the correct line but being in a longer boat than the rest of us, she drove slightly too hard and ended up behind the School House Rock in a very swirly eddy. I breezed by her while she was trying to get out. It wasn't a hard rapid, I just angled left and gave one stroke. At this level, the water wasn't really pushing into the undercut. Renee had been in the same eddy last year when it was much more violent, so she got out of it fairly easy this time.
A few minutes further and we were at the park-and-play spot Todd and I had been at the day before. This was our take-out.
It was a good day on the river. Only a couple of hours, but over 6 miles.
We went to the FibArk festival for the afternoon and evening. We watched several of the rodeo boating competitions. We even got to see the Houligan Race. This is a race where people design their own floating monstrosities to run a short section of the river. If their craft stays intact to the main rodeo hole, then there is a chance they can jump up and grab an orange bag strung across the hole about 10 feet up, which contains money. Notable contramptions were: The Styrofoam 16 -oot long boat that disintegrated seconds before thy hit the hole. Many pool floats held together buy duct tape. The flaoting trampooline never made it to within sight. Some made it through the hole perfectly fine. Others by the time they got to the hole had only someone clinging to something that barely floated. It was hillarious.
We ran into Jared Seiler just before we left the festival and he convinced us to stay for the Boater X video at 10 p.m. He wasn't able to compete this weekend cause he had injured his finger skateboarding. But, his brother Graham came in second on the BoaterX race. So we watched the 30 minute video with all the past years carnage and the ful races of this year. It was intense.
We got back to the hotel just before midnight.
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