Quote:
Originally Posted by Luckbox Inc
well, do go on with the near drowning story....
Time to do this one. I'll add details that a kayaker would already know, so the whole thing is coherent to everybody.
When I was in California I was a class IV+ kayaker whose friends were class V kayakers. I've done some amazing rivers (and some incredibly beautiful ones), some of which were beyond my skill level.
But let's back up, to a run on the easy part of the Kings, the class IV run there. I hit a little (I mean, no more than a foot high) breaking wave sideways, low braced on it with my right hand — and felt my shoulder go. The leverage get from an extended arm plus an extended paddel is considerable, and my imperfect form put my shoulder in a vulnerable position. Later it would turn out that I had torn the capsular ligament, the labrum, and one of the two halves of the biceps tendon.
But at first that all wasn't clear, and for months I kept kayaking. My shoulder kept coming out of place, essentially constantly, until it got to the point where I really couldn't brace on my right at all. I also could rarely roll successfully using my right, which was bad because my left roll had always been terrible. Basically, I'm not a completely natural athlete — i can easily get good at things, but great just isn't within my range in most athletic endeavors, and kayaking was no exception: my skills were incomplete.
So I ignored all this and kept boating. The next spring we did the Toulumn — the Cherry Creek run, which is the classic Class V run. (The normal class IV run is great fun, but needs a lot of water to work well, but I digress again...) One of the rapids on that run is called the miracle mile. It's about a mile of literally continuous rapids, dropping a stunning (to someone who knows) 220 feet over that mile. It's not big drops, either; rather, it's a solid mile of twists and turns... and death traps.
It comes toward the end of the run, too. By the time we got to it, I was exhausted — i just wasn't good enough for the run, and kept having to use power to get out of spots where my friends could use finess. And then came miracle mile, and toward the end of it I made a mistake in a drop and needed to ferry right pretty rapidly... and my shoulder couldn't do it. tbh it really wasn't even the shoulder any more at that point, I think — I just didn't have anything left.
The result was that I washed broadside (left side) into a house sized rock. this would have been no big deal except that the rock was undercut — that means the water (much of the river, in fact) was going under it. With about 1200 cfs (cubic feet per second) in a pretty small river bed at the time, this was bad.
The above statement is the epitome of understatement: what I just described means death. Basically, water + rock = death, if one isn't careful and sometimes even when one is. The river
wants to kill you — and undercut rocks are the way it does it. (one of the best, anyway)
My boat sank, with me in it of course. And then it got pinned under the rock, several feet down — broadside to the current and wedged in, it was under thousands of pounds of force. It was not going anywhere for a while, so I had to get out of it, or I would die.
I was in a Perception Dancer, a pretty maneuverable boat that unfortunately has a fairly narrow cockpit. Kayaks are plastic, basically Tupperware (there are fiberglass ones too). Tupperwear bends. Under that force, my kayak pressed down onto my thighs, pinning me there. I couldn't move. It was at this point that I though the thoughts I related earlier: "I'm probably about to die." No fear, really, just a sort of a calm surprise, and disappointment.
I thought about this for a bit, decided that "can't move my legs" wasn't an acceptable answer, and started to wiggle rather than pull, and I was able to start working my way out. It ripped up my shins some on the way out, as the boat kept compressing, but once my knees were free I knew I would live. After getting out of the boat I still had to work my way hand-overhand, in the current, along the bottom of the rock to the edge, but then I was finally able to let my life jacket do its job and get me to the surface.
My friends were obviously stunned at it all. they were experts in rescue but there was absolutely nothing to be done about this, and they were all convinced I was gone. (Some had been present a couple years before when another kayaker, this one a real expert, had died in a silly little rapid on the Kings, so they'd been there before, as it were.) They swore that I was under for about a minute, though frankly that doesn't seem likely — but I have no solid sense of the time myself, so maybe.
My boat was under there for about half an hour, at which point something must have moved under there and it worked its way free. My paddle popped up after forty-five minutes. I hiked out — there was no way I was getting back in the boat that day, nor that my friends would let me.
And I was left with the knowledge of what it's like to know you're about to die.
(There's a followup to this, which I'll type up after dinner.)
Last edited by atakdog; 11-16-2009 at 12:08 AM.