"Bob P" wrote in message
. com...
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.

Great tale! Its sort of spooky, too!

Sure, we all try Desperation Moves when in desperate situations, and any
paddler with tons of experience will have a tale to tell. But promoting the
'shed the PFD' anecdote from 'Desperation Move' to 'River Strategy' is
inappropriate, imnsho. Desperation Moves are born of specific situations
mixed with a paddler's experience and assessment of what to do right there,
right now. They aren't universally applicable, and its useless to try to
learn them all. There are a bazillion 'desperation moves'....we all have our
tales. But 'self-rescue strategies' are, or should be, tried and tested
strategies that all river runners are familar with and that have a high
record of success; not in theory, but in commonly encountered situations.
This one doesn't seem to fit the mold of such things as, say, breathing in
the air pocket in front of your face when trapped in a vertical pin, or some
of the various rope tricks for unpinning boats, or dragging a line across
the river to free a foot entrapment. Those were all originally 'desperation
moves' that have become 'rescue strategies' that everyone has heard about.

--riverman