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Near Deaths on the Lower Gauley
Larry Cable wrote:
Walt
Typed in Message-ID:
I have no problem with experinenced boaters with the proper training and
experience shooting class V water. But rafts full of clueless tourists
don't belong there. (and neither do I)
However, the Lower Gauley is a Class III/IV
river at best, most of the river being Class III. It's pool and drop, and
although there are undercuts and other dangers, is relatively easy on swimmers.
The problem with the commercial rafting operations is that they treat
the tourists like so many sacks of potatoes. If the sacks bounce out of
the rafts, the guide rounds them up and hopes he can find them all and
that they're not too damaged. And
if the sack gets hurt, well it's the
sack's fault not the guide's. What's amazing is that they don't kill
more people than they do.
How about the problem being that the average raft customer treats the river as
an amusement park ride and doesn't pay any attention to safety or instructions.
I don't want to totally defend the rafting industry, which has it's share of
problems, but a guide isn't any better than the crew he gets stuck with that
day. Arnold Swartznegger couldn't handle a 16' raft full of tourist that are
all air bracing and not getting a paddle in the water. Yet many passengers seem
to expect that from the guides.
We used to eat lunch at Dimple on the Lower Yough. I would predict which rafts
were going to have trouble with pretty amazing accuracy. After awhile, my
companions asked how I did it. It was pretty simple, you just watched how
effective a stroke the paddlers were taking.
If they were not paddling or using just the tip, banging each others paddles,
etc, it was a good bet that they would bang the Rock at Dimple, not know how to
high side and either flip or dump most of the people out of the raft.
In the immortal words of a young female guide on the Upper Ocoee as she
attempted to ferry to river left above Humongous when all of her "guest" just
stopped paddling, PADDLE!PADDLE!!PADDLE!!!
SYOTR
Larry C.
So, what I have seen, and read, is that experienced river runners tend to down grade a river.
JAM
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