riverman wrote:
"Bob P"

It's the only path where the water takes you to safety rather than holding
you against the top flow. I've never use it, and I certainly don't intend
to experiment, but the logic is reasonable.

Sure, if you assume that all the natural variations don't exist. All logic
is reasonable is you start with 'lets ignore any diversity to the model'.
Its like that old joke about the mathematician, the physicist and the
engineer betting on a horserace, and the mathematician says 'assume a
spherical horse'. :-)

--riverman

So you wouldn't try the maneuver even if you knew you were going to
drown if you did nothing?

Here's a little story. It happened to me about 20 years ago.

We were paddling the Thurmond-to-Fayette section of the New River (WV)
at fairly low water.

About 2/3 of the way down there's an huge rock on river right (unknown
to me as The Undercut Rock). I had run the rapid a couple of times
before at high water and pillowed off the rock quite nicely. This time,
however, I came right up to the rock, broached and flipped upstream.
The boat was sucked down, down, down and finally lodged quite nicely
upside down with me in it. I popped my skirt, undid my thigh straps,
and tried to push myself out of the boat, but the water pressure kept me
pinned. Tried again, and again.

Hey! I'm going to die here! Time for a Desperation Move!

I reached above my head (actually down) and, (Holy Crap!) there was the
cockpit rim of another pinned boat below me. Somehow, I was then able
to pull myself out using the cockpit rim. I guess that the extra reach
was enough to get me all the way out of the boat.

I pushed off and was able to get into the current enough to get around
the rock. Come on Charlie Walbridge (pfd)!!! I reached the surface
just before I was about to take a nasty breath of water.

My boat came out 2 days later, when the water dropped even more.

So sometimes you do things, even if they have a low probability of success.