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Bill Tuthill wrote:
That's why one possibility is to remove your pfd and crawl on the
bottom past the boil,

Think about that carefully for a second. Crawl on the bottom? With all that
current and turbulence? This is the problem when hypotheticals become
anecdotal. Does anyone know of anyone who has 'crawled along the bottom of
the river' at the base of a waterfall or in fast current? I certainly don't,
although I know of lots of folks who have been recirced and flushed.

I think the actuality would be that you would be tumbling around like a
ragdoll, no idea what was happening or what way was up, rapidly running out
of air and without a PFD. With any luck you might flush through the bottom
and come up for air while you still had enough clarity of mind to know when
to grab a breath, but you'd probably not have enough wits to know which way
to swim to the surface. Certainly this is better than flushing around the
recirc until you drowned, but I suspect that in real life, its a
disorienting and disasterous situation.

No offense to the poster, but people throw around this self-rescue technique
like its a pretty straightforward deal, and I think its not only not
straightforward, I have serious doubts about how often it even happens as
described.

--riverman