Normally, I try pretty hard to avoid all “discussions” on Facebook anymore that could even slightly be construed as political, or controversial at all. Mostly pictures of travel and forests and my dog. A lot of people don’t seem to be able to handle any more than that while staying civil and tolerant. I generally haven’t ever put any of that on my blog, either, but this is a pretty long read for a FB post, so I’ll see how it goes doing a little of this kind of writing over here.

Since I fly United fairly regularly now, and was traveling by air yesterday when the news of this mess was all over social media and every TV set, I’ll toss out a few random thoughts that come to mind:

First of all, United is not my favorite airline. I do have quite a few miles piled up there, but generally I’ve had fewer delays with Delta than with United. I’m not a United fanboy, by any means. Nor am I generally inclined to apologize and make excuses for large corporations or the police when they are obviously behaving badly.

United is a big old legacy airline, and it seems like there should have been plenty of resources available to them – at one of their major hubs, no less! – to get their employees where they needed to be, without doing what they did. Even if they had to put them on a plane with no one else on it, and fly them down to KY all by themselves, that surely would have been a lot cheaper than what they did end up doing. Over $500 million in market valuation wiped off the board in one day? Whoops!

United’s screw up in deadheading their own staff is not the problem of the flying customers, and should not have to be solved on the backs of the customers. It’s only a five hour trip by car, let alone if you already own a bunch of jet airplanes. Throwing paying customers off of a flight in order to shuffle staff around seems like a really, really crappy way to run an airline. I get why airlines overbook, and I get that sometimes people will get bumped, or paid to be bumped. I understand that that is a part of the process, and I’m not criticizing that, per se.

However, this guy was already boarded and seated. I haven’t read all the rules and laws about this situation, but my impression has been that once you have scanned your boarding pass, passed through the gate, and been seated on the plane, with your bags loaded, you have to be misbehaving in some pretty dramatic manner in order to be removed from the airplane. Not just because United changed their minds after boarding you, and now wants you off. Some things I’ve read over the past couple of days seem contradictory around this issue. I don’t know what the correct, legal answer is.

I do know what it means to do decent customer service, though, and this was not that. If you need the seats for your staff, sort that out BEFORE boarding the passengers, not after. It’s got to be way easier and less likely to result in a PR disaster to piss someone off who is still OUTSIDE the gate, than to drag them off the plane, unconscious, in front of a bunch of smartphones taking video. People getting bumped from flights while waiting outside the gate happens hundreds of times a day, and is a normal part of the flying experience. Dragging someone off a plane that you already let them board? Not so much.

In the aftermath of this mess, pretty much every official statement made by United over this seems engineered to drive their credibility and stock price even lower. Everything seems to be about blaming the passenger, and I haven’t seen anything at all that resembles even a tiny little mea culpa about how this mess even started developing in the first place.

As to the passenger: Once the po-po put their hands on you, unless you plan to go down in a blaze of glory over your seat on an eighty minute commuter flight, you should recognize that you have already lost the immediate battle. You might still win the war later, with lawyers and all that jazz, but nothing good can come from violently, physically resisting at that point. They are not going to give up because you screamed at them, or struggled. Even if what they’re doing is or seems wrong. This guy was definitely well within his rights to object to how he was being treated by United, but screaming and kicking and fighting with the cops was idiotic, and the outcome was completely predictable. (And for all the idiots on social media declaring that this was “racism” because a randomly selected passenger happened to be Asian? Please just stop… )

I am not flying pro by any means, but I am a quick learner, and I work pretty hard to be a cooperative and friendly passenger. I’ve noticed that an awful lot of people holding boarding passes don’t seem to get that concept. Yesterday, for example, I witnessed nearly an entire plane load of people who just could not seem to get their shit together. Multiple people trying to board before their group was called (even AFTER multiple announcements by the gate agent NOT to try that), people dragging way too many and too large of “carry on” bags and other items along, and resisting the pleas of the gate agents to gate check the larger carry ons. Then people standing in the aisle chatting with their friends, partially unpacking and repacking their bags, and generally NOT getting seated in a timely fashion. Lady in front of me puts her bag in a mostly empty bin and then closes the bin, as if no one else would need to use that space! One mom wandering up and down the aisles while boarding was going on, trying to get other people to give up their seats so she and her teenager could sit together, and generally clogging up the process, and resisting the flight attendants’ efforts to get her seated until boarding was completed. People headed to the bathroom while the plane was trying to get pushed off from the gate, and ignoring flight attendants pleas to be seated for push-off. Then, hours later at baggage claim, people from that same flight grabbing multiple bags off the carousel and then just leaving them lay in a mess right next to the carousel while they futzed and got into bags looking for things, and then went looking for a cart while leaving their bags in the way of anyone else needing to access their bags. In short, big swaths of the flying public seem to be clueless, entitled jackasses who cannot or will not get their shit together to make things flow more smoothly for everyone around them. God bless the flight attendants who have to put up with this shit every day, and somehow refrain from dope-slapping every third or fourth customer.

And seriously, not one person booked for this $200, eighty minute flight was willing to accept $800 and a hotel voucher to get bumped? Really? They could have hopped in a rental car and still made it home that night! Or taken the hotel voucher, hopped on United 5477 the next AM and still been to their destination by 10AM. Since pretty much all my travel is for work, I do understand needing to be someplace at a particular time. But I also understand that shit does sometimes happen, and one needs to be adaptable and prepared for things to not go as planned.

Tons of people on my Facebook feed are declaring that they will never, ever fly United again, as if this problem could never have happened with any other carrier. I have to admit, that United is where most of my delays have happened over my short flying career. As I stated above, they’re not my favorite airline. But having a pile of United miles still on the books, and often needing to use United since my work would like me to book the most economical flights that meet my scheduling needs, I don’t have the luxury of saying, “never ever again!”

If it had been me? I probably would have already taken the $800 and been at the rental car agency by the time they finished boarding the flight.


Just loving these long twilights here...

I’ll have more to say, and tons more pictures in a few days, but after my first trip overseas, I learned a few things:

My luggage sucks.

Generally in the US, I try to pack everything into my small roller bag and one small duffel with a shoulder strap. This time, I was transporting 50 pounds of course materials, plus warm clothes and heavy boots, and I ended up with a couple of very heavy, awkward bags to lug around foreign airports. Fortunately, Icelandair allows two free checked bags, but once we switched to Air Iceland and Air Greenland, everything over 20 kilos worth of checked bags cost extra, and only one small carry on like a computer bag was allowed. I need to rethink my luggage! There’s a sentence that I never thought I would need, had you asked me a couple of years ago.

Always take two functioning credit cards.

Earlier this summer, a grumpy Chinese lady in a airport coffee kiosk at SFO had a hard time getting my United rewards VISA to swipe, so she bent it a little bit, lengthwise, right in front of me. Somewhere between Seattle and Iceland, the chip fell out. I had it in Seattle when I bought some Icelandic currency, and when I tried to use it in the duty free shop at Keflavik, it was gone. In the US, this is probably not such a problem, but in Europe, everything runs on the chip cards. Some places would let me swipe it after three failed attempts with the chip, but that trick didn’t work everywhere. Meanwhile, back at home, another brand new chip card was sitting in my desk drawer, because I didn’t think I’d really need two… D’oh! Also, it would be really helpful to learn at least enough Danish to know what the credit card machine is telling me to do.

Using foreign currency is fun.

When I got to Qaqortoq, I realized that the broken chip card was going to be a continuous pain in the ass, so I called back home to the credit union, warned them that I was overseas, and started taking Danish currency out of the ATM to pay for everything. Which turned out to be more fun than using the card would have been anyway. My expense report is going to be a little complicated though, in US dollars, Euros, Danish Kroner and Icelandic Krone. Also, about foreign currency, I won’t buy it at the currency exchange at the airport again. I paid too much for the ISK I bought there; it would have been better to simply use an ATM in Iceland.

I love flying on small, noisy prop planes and helicopters.

Once it was time to leave Iceland, I had to get to the smaller, domestic airport in Reykjavik itself for the flight out of Iceland. We got on an Air Iceland twin prop DeHavilland Dash-8, which took us to Nuuk. The next morning we got on another Dash-8 belonging to Air Greenland, which took us back east and south to Narsarsuaq, and then we got in a small Bell helicopter which took us the rest of the way to Qaqortoq. The helicopter flight was especially fun. Next time, though, I will bring ear plugs for the Dash-8 flights. The first couple of times we sat forward of the props, and the noise was pretty mild. On the return flight to Nuuk, we sat aft of the props, and the noise during the ascent was pretty loud. Still, very fun, and very short takeoffs, too, which seemed almost eerie compared to flying on large jets.

More in a few days, once I get pictures sorted out…


Our next ride, Narsarsuaq to Nuuk


Idaho/Montana Road Trip, June 2016

All this traveling for work got me more interested in traveling in general, and I made a few short road trips this summer, too. When I flew to Minnesota in May for work, I dropped off the pup at the trainer’s place in southern Idaho, and left her there for five weeks. After I got home, Alice and I made a short road trip to go pick her up. I had never been to Montana except passing through when I was seven years old, and hadn’t been to northern Idaho since I was a teenager, so we decided to take a few days and make a big long loop around to southern Idaho that way.


Darby, Montana


Salmon River, Idaho

Idaho and Montana were beautiful! We went to Spokane first, then over to Missoula where we spent the night. The next day, we drove south all day long down Highway 93, through the Rockies and for a while along the beautiful Salmon River, then out to Highway 20, which we took to Twin Falls, but not before stopping at the Craters of the Moon National Monument. We had thought about trying to go to Yellowstone, but there just wasn’t enough time in either of our schedules to pull that off. That will have to be another road trip…


Idaho/Montana Road Trip, June 2016

But Craters of the Moon was amazing! If you’ve never been there, and you’re traveling through southern Idaho, it’s worth a visit. Here’s a short description of what’s going on geologically there.


Idaho/Montana Road Trip, June 2016


Lava, Craters of the Moon, Idaho


Idaho/Montana Road Trip, June 2016


Idaho/Montana Road Trip, June 2016

We spent the night in Twin Falls, picked up the pup the next morning, and started the very long drive home from there.


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For about a year now, my brother and I have been looking for a piece of land on the east side of the state, as a woodlot and hunting and camping spot. Since the evil empire Weyerhaeuser has been gobbling up all the other timber companies and their land, they’ve been gating off roads and making people buy expensive permits or leases in order to be allowed to hunt, or even walk on their land.

My neighborhood has been suffering from this especially in the past year, ever since Weyco bought out all of Longview Fibre’s lands, which included quite a bit of land right near me. Now mainline roads have been gated off, and some of those gates block access to state land, too. What state land remains accessible is going to be even more crowded with hunters in the future, since not everyone has the money or the desire to pay Weyco for the privilege of walking on their timberlands.

So, I’ve been looking east. The last few times I’ve made road trips out that way, I’ve been liking the landscape more and more, and so we decided we should look for a piece of land out that way, and this summer, we made a short road trip over to Okanogan and Ferry counties to scope out the area.


Okanogan/Ferry County Road Trip, July 2016


Okanogan/Ferry County Road Trip, July 2016


Okanogan/Ferry County Road Trip, July 2016

We headed over from Seattle one day, out through the beautiful Methow Valley, and over to the eastern part of Okanogan County, where we camped at a USFS campground at Bonaparte Lake.


Dinner at Bonaparte Lake resort...


Campsite

We spent most of our time around the small town of Republic, exploring the roads to the north of there, and to the east and west of Curlew. We saw a lot of beautiful country, and some evidence of some really huge wildfires. We drove past a piece of land that I almost bought almost 25 years ago, too, near Kettle Falls, but we ended up liking the look of the area around Republic a lot better.


Thistles and burned landscape, Boulder Creek Rd, Ferry County


It's for sale... ;-)

When it was time to go back, we decided that we should take the detour south to check out Grand Coulee dam, which neither of us had ever seen, in spite of living almost our entire lives in Washington state.

We headed back towards the town of Tonasket, and then cut back south and east on Aeneas Valley Road, since there were a few parcels listed for sale there, and we wanted to get a look at the landscape. My map showed it to be a dead end, but James’ atlas was newer, and showed that it went all the way through to State Highway 21, which would take us south towards the dam.


Okanogan/Ferry County Road Trip, July 2016

We were kind of both right, actually. The road quickly turned to gravel, and then got smaller and smaller, passed through the Okanogan National Forest, and then we came to a sign where the USFS road ended, and Bureau of Indian Affairs “Highway” 6 began. We were now on the Colville reservation. What was already a pretty sketchy little logging road got sketchier, and I didn’t get out of second gear for quite a while. We passed through a lot of burned areas, saw a bear, and lots of fireweed, and dodged a lot of oil-pan-killing rocks in the road, but we eventually did make it down to Highway 21 unscathed.


Okanogan/Ferry County Road Trip, July 2016

For all the damage it did to the salmon runs, I have to admit that Grand Coulee Dam is an impressive piece of work. We rolled into the small town of Coulee Dam after hours of driving in the dry pine forests and scrub lands, and it was really surreal to suddenly be in 1950’s style, tree lined suburban neighborhoods, with every lawn lush and green! All that water right there, and people wanted trees and lawns in the desert, so that’s what they did.


Okanogan/Ferry County Road Trip, July 2016

We stopped for a bit there, and for lunch at a pub in Electric City, and then headed over through endless grain fields to Leavenworth, where we camped at Lake Wenatchee State Park.

I cannot recommend this as a camping spot. It was busy, even on a Sunday night. The campsites are small, and right on top of each other, with little to no privacy, and we paid $30 just for a tent site! I’m happy for public lands, and for state parks, but I’m not always happy to interact with them, especially at those prices. A nicer tent site at Lake Bonaparte was only $12 per night. There’s gotta be better and cheaper places to camp near Leavenworth, but we didn’t find them this time.

A couple of weeks later, I did find a website that will come in handy in the future: https://freecampsites.net/


Okanogan/Ferry County Road Trip, July 2016


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016

I’ve had a summer full of travel – a lot more than I usually do – and I’m about to go to Greenland in less than two weeks, which will also generate a ton of pictures, so I figured I should probably get some of the summer’s pics and stories posted before I get too far behind!


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016

I spent much of the spring this year traveling to work for Wilderness Medical Associates, teaching WFR courses. My last course of the spring was at the Widjiwagan YMCA camp, outside of Ely, MN. People have been telling me for many years that I need to check out the canoeing in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, so I decided to take an extra week off, as long as I was already there, and do a little canoeing and exploring.


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016

My plans were cut a little bit short by some high winds and lightning storms that kicked up on the day that I had intended to go in, so I was stuck waiting for a couple of days while that cleared up, but I finally picked up a really nice, very lightweight Northstar Northwind Solo canoe from Sawtooth Outfitters in Tofte, MN, and headed up to the Kawishiwi Lake entry point. I had planned to go in for four or five days, but now only really had three, so I just drove up to the put in, and jumped on the water, and figured I would sort out the details as I went.


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016

It was a really cold, grey, cloudy and drizzly day, and I wasn’t in a very good mood already, and it took a while of just paddling and paddling to start to get my head clear. For the first part of the trip, I was paddling through a pretty recent burn zone, too, and the landscape seemed kind of bleak. There were tons of biting insects, and there were a couple of extremely soggy and muddy portages, too. I ran into a beaver dam that wasn’t on any maps, but eventually found my way to Polly Lake, where I had hoped to camp for the first night. I paddled up towards the north end of the lake, and found a really sweet, empty campsite on a big block of granite right over the water.


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016

I set up camp, and then paddled back out in the rain to try some fishing for a while, before calling it a day, and going to bed.


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016

It rained and blew pretty hard that night, and I was really glad I had put an extra tarp over my tent. The next morning was bright and sunny, though, and I decided to get a campfire going to see if I could boost my mood. Crumpled up paper was so damp that it just steamed, and I was just sitting there, feeling cold and damp and grumpy, and I just decided I needed a shift in attitude. What an opportunity to practice a little bushcraft! There had to be some way to make a fire, and so I started wandering in the woods to see what I could find. I ended up discovering a lot of dried pitch on pine trees, and also that if I flaked off the outer scales of bark that were wet, the next layer of bark scales was much drier, and I collected a small handful of that stuff, some pitch, and some birchbark, and ended up getting a nice fire going on the first match after that.


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016

A good campfire improves one’s mood considerably, and I had a nice breakfast, coffee, and laid in the sun by the fire for a while, and decided to explore further into the lakes as a day trip, and leave my camp set up where it was.


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016

I took a day pack and the fishing gear, and headed out, exiting Polly Lake at the north end, and went up through a tiny little unnamed lake, Koma Lake, and finally into Malberg Lake, where there was supposedly decent walleye fishing. I paddled all around the north end of Malberg for a while, stopping and fishing and exploring the long eastern arm, too, and finally decided it was time to head home.


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016

I got back to camp, made dinner, watched my beaver neighbors cruising back and forth, had a shot of rye whisky, and went to bed a much more relaxed and happy camper than I had been the night before.


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016

The next morning, I went fishing again for a while, then finally packed up camp and started back out. The long portages seemed way shorter now that I knew what they were about, and I was back in Kawishiwi before I expected to be and I still had plenty of time to get the canoe back, so I spent a while paddling all around the lake, fishing and scoping it out. I had really, really been hoping to see a moose, and I had paddled through a few places that seemed pretty likely to have some, but there had been no moose anywhere. I was literally a half mile from the take out, and fishing my way around a little island, when I looked across to the shore, and sure enough, there was a moose standing there! She ended up letting me get within a hundred yards or less, before she had enough, and took off, but a few hundred yards later, I ran into another one, too!


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016

I never did catch any fish on this paddling trip, but got some great pictures, and saw a ton of plants that were new to me. I learned that I can paddle and portage a lot faster than the guide books expect, and I know now that when I come back some day, I can plan on traveling much farther each day than the guide books would have suggested. I also realized how uncommon it is for canoeists to know a J stroke. I saw 32 other paddlers while I was in there, most at a distance, but only two of them were using a J-stroke, and they were the USFS rangers who were doing campsite inventory work. I joked to the outfitter back in Tofte that I was going to move to Minnesota and make $50k a summer teaching the J stroke at the BWCA entry points.


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016

I packed up all my gear into the rental car, got in and killed about 100 mosquitos that had gathered inside while I was packing, and headed back to Tofte to return the canoe, and then on to Duluth to fly out the next day. I cannot wait to come back and paddle in the BWCA again.

Oh, and by the way, I can highly recommend Sawtooth Outfitters if you’re needing a canoe or gear in that area, and also the lovely, super light and perfect Northstar Northwind Solo canoe that they rented me.


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016


BWCA paddling trip, June 2-4, 2016

Once again, I find myself a little surprised at how long it’s been since I updated this blog. I’ve been meaning to, but things have been busy, and I find what usually happens is that I write a post in my head, but before I get around to publishing it, I decide that it’s not worth publishing, and then more weeks and months pass. In the meantime, the last entry on the blog is titled, “Death.” Not exactly representative of my life right now!

Anyway, here’s an update that is long overdue.


From yesterday

I came home from Michigan in the fall of 2014, took my NREMT test, and over the course of the next few months, did a lot of paperwork and more testing until finally the state of Washington DOH got tired of me bugging them, and gave me an EMT license. I’m now a volunteer EMT with both Skamokawa VFD and Cathlamet FD, which is what I needed to move on to the next step in my changing career plans, becoming an instructor for Wilderness Medical Associates.


Rig check and OTEP tonight

I went to the WMA instructor training in March of 2015, and got hired at the end of the course, but I wasn’t able to work that spring, because of my other conflicting work schedules. I finally started teaching for WMA last December, and by the end of the spring season, I had worked as an instructor for 51 days, all over the place. I’ve been to the LA area, SE Ohio, SE Missouri, Gettysburg, PA, northern Wisconsin and northern Minnesota.


Widjiwagan dining hall

Besides learning a lot about teaching, which I will be learning about for the rest of my life, I also learned that I like traveling. I’ve rarely done much more traveling than west coast road trips before. Until I went to Michigan, I had only ever been on commercial aircraft twice in my life, in 1991. Now I’ve been through a dozen different airports this year, some more than once.

Everyone told me I was going to hate it, but I found that I actually like flying. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of the long TSA lines, or the ridiculous security theater that that entails. I’ve learned to dislike at least a couple of the nation’s largest airports, O’Hare and Dulles. But I’ve also found that I really like some of the smaller ones, like Duluth and Traverse City, and I really liked Denver, too, although I’ve only been through there once so far.


Headed home

I like the people watching, I like the amazing level of complexity that goes into a working airport, and I like airplanes, too. I love machines of all kinds, and a commercial jet is a pretty amazing piece of machinery. I like taking off and landing, and the complexity of the wings working to do the job of lifting all those tons of loaded airplane into the sky, and then bringing the whole thing gently back onto the ground. I’m not a huge fan of the long, boring hours in between, which is why I usually try to get a window seat, so there’s something to look at. I’m slowly learning various tips and tricks for more comfortable and practical air travel, and the very beginnings of how to use mileage points accounts. The Points Guy has been helpful.


upload

I loved seeing all kinds of new places, most of which turned out to be more interesting and pleasing than I had thought they would be. Gettysburg touched me on a level that I did not expect. SE Ohio was more beautiful and interesting than I thought it would be, and the Great Lakes region is a place I plan to go back to as often as I can manage it. I love Duluth, and Lake Superior. I love smoked whitefish. I even learned to tolerate a level of biting insects that I never would have imagined getting used to.


More lake views...

In between all of this travel and activity and life changes, I finally shot a deer, bought a Brittany spaniel puppy and started learning about upland bird hunting, put a brand new logging winch on the tractor and started actively thinning my woodlot, started remodeling my barn and trying to get a handle on my messy shop, and also spent much more time than I ever anticipated dealing with my aging parents, and working on helping them sell off some assets and remodeling my dad’s office building. I caught a few fish, and took a few pictures, too.


Excited pup

Coming soon, some pics and words about a short canoe trip in the Boundary Waters.


Canoeing on Burntside Lake


My favorite image of this hike

As my wife Shannon has said, there is a special place in hell for fickle bloggers, and I suppose I’ll be spending at least some of eternity there. It’s been a busy year, and suddenly I realized that I had multiple sets of photos sorted out to go with blog posts that I never got around to finishing and posting. So, I’ll throw this one out there, and try to catch up with the others later. You can see the rest of my pictures from this trip here.


IMGP8881.jpg

After a few years of trying in vain to shoot a deer in the thick, dense rainforest that I live in, I started yearning for a little more open country to hunt in, and started thinking of making a trip to the east side of the state to hunt mule deer. There is a special “High Buck Hunt” in Washington every September, in which you can hunt only in select wilderness areas. I had been looking at the Glacier Peaks Wilderness area maps, and when I found out that my neighbor Levi was also thinking along the same lines, we decided to do a little recon trip up there to see what it was like.


trail

When I was in high school, I did quite a bit of backpacking, with the Boy Scouts and with the outdoor education program at Charles Wright Academy. And the last time I went backpacking was probably in 1982 or 83. So, there were a few issues to be concerned about. Much of my gear was from the seventies and early eighties, and not very light weight, my boots are not really backpacking boots, I am not exactly in tip-top backpacking condition, AND I decided that I might as well take a rifle and a bear tag, in case we found a bear that looked good. Oh, and a spotting scope and folding tripod, and a few other things here and there…

After a long drive up through Seattle and out over Stevens Pass, and a short time driving a few miles down the wrong Forest Service dirt road, we finally made our first night’s camp at the White River Falls campground, and the next morning, spent an hour and a half or so, repacking our bags, and leaving a bunch of stuff in the car. We finally got to the trailhead, loaded up and started walking around 10:30 AM.


Me, first time on a backpacking trip in 30 years...


Levi, ready to hike

The first few miles were along the White River, walking through some really beautiful old growth forest, and getting eaten alive by mosquitoes and biting flies. Eventually, we stopped at this crossing of Boulder Creek to put on some vile bug juice, and for Levi to tend to his blisters, since he had a pair of boots that didn’t fit quite right.


tending blisters

A little ways past this crossing, we came to the junction where the Boulder Pass trail #1562 takes off of the main White River trail #1507. There was a large group of tents there at the junction; we later talked to some kids who were on a trip that had been horse packed in and was camping there at the junction.


bear sign

As soon as we left the White River behind and started working our way up the switchbacks, the work suddenly got a lot harder, but the annoying insects started to subside as well. Part way up this hill, at about 3500′ elevation, I “hit the wall” as they say, and ended up stashing all my hunting gear in the brush, so I could shed about 25# of weight. It did get easier after that, and we made it up to the campsite in the trees at 4000′ in short order. We checked out the river crossing beyond the campsite, filled water bottles, and I dropped my pack at camp and went back down for the hunting kit, and brought it up.


lower campsite


first view of the upper basin

We camped there that night, and I ate a freeze dried backpacking meal for the first time since I was about 17 years old. The only deer we saw in person while we were up there showed up at our campsite soon after we settled in. It turned out she was very interested in the salt that we left behind wherever we had peed.


camp deer

The next day we decided to get ourselves up to Boulder Pass and have a look around. I packed up optics and the rifle and butchering tools in case we ran across a bear, and we headed up. I started out wearing my crocs, and carrying my boots on the pack.


camp


the upper campsite

We went astray after crossing a snow field, and couldn’t easily find the trail on the other side. We knew we needed to start gaining elevation, so we started looking on the high side, and eventually found a trail, although it was much more overgrown than what we had been using. After a few hundred yards we saw “boulder pass” and an arrow pointing the way painted on a boulder, so we figured we were on the right track. But this was an old, unmaintained trail, and we ended up bushwhacking up through some timber, coming across the trail from time to time, but eventually we lost it altogether. Along the way, I finally had to put my boots on, as the crocs were not up to the task anymore. We came out way up high, and in a steep, open meadow, which we crossed, and up above we found the remains of the old trail, headed in the direction we wanted to go.


climbing up along the old trail


red algae on the snow pack

We crossed some more snow, but eventually made it back to the regular trail, just below the pass. At the pass itself, we had one more chunk of thick icy snow to cross and climb over, and then we were standing on the pass itself, looking down into Napeequa Valley.


Napeequa Valley


Napeequa Valley


Napeequa Valley

We sat up there, had lunch and drank our Fort George beers after cooling them in the snow. We played around with the spotting scope, boggled at the scale of the Napeequa Valley, and then finally headed back down to camp, coming across some marmots, and finding our way on the regular trail.


Fort George beer at 6300'


Looking into the Napeequa


marmots!


looking down the valley

The next day, we decided that we should move back down to the campsite at the trail junction and look for a bear down below. We hadn’t seen any ripe berries, or fresh bear sign near where we were, and we thought the berries might be better down by the river.


Boulder Creek

When we got down to the intersection of the trails, though, the big group was still camped there, and we decided to just pack out to the car, have a break in town, and then go check out the surrounding area. We ran into a group of young people headed in on the trail near the bottom, and one of the guys was clearly VERY bothered by the fact that I was carrying a rifle. The other three seemed friendly enough, but about a half hour later, they passed us headed right back OUT again. Apparently, we had ruined that guy’s day, and he wanted to get far away from us, and apparently, any place that we had even been.


at the pass

We stopped by the USFS office in Leavenworth, hoping to find some more specific information about trails, and which ones allowed pack animals and which did not. The woman at the desk HAD a booklet that had all that information in it, but she said there were no more copies available when I asked to buy one. Apparently, the FS did not have a budget to print any more copies. We purchased a few maps, but generally, we got very little in the way of useful information, and the women working in the office seemed beleaguered and not well equipped to answer most of our questions.

After a burger and a beer in town, we headed out the Icicle Creek road, to the very end, where we camped just inside the wilderness boundary at the trailhead. Every single FS campsite on the Icicle Road was operated by a for profit company, and even just a simple tent site seemed expensive to me, especially considering how crowded with RVs many of the campgrounds were. We were happy to pitch our tents in the woods just off the trail for free.

There were LOTS of ripe thimbleberries here, and signs that bears had been there recently, so I stayed up until sunset with the rifle, wandering around and looking for a bear. About an hour after dark, and with me almost asleep, I could hear the bears moving around in the berries, about 50 yards away….


Svea 123 stove

When I got home, tired and a little sore, I gathered up all my gear and weighed it. It turns out that AFTER we ate a bunch of food, burned some stove fuel and drank our beers, my pack and rifle still weighed 65 pounds. That sure did explain my sore hips and shoulders! Since then, I’ve been sorting through gear, setting aside the stuff that we didn’t end up using, and replacing a few of the heavier items with more modern, lightweight gear. I now have a couple of small, titanium pots that weigh less than half of what the pots I carried weigh. For now, though, I’m sticking with the Svea 123 stove, as it’s compact, simple and reliable, relatively light weight, and I already own it. There’s still a lot of weight shedding I need to do, both from my gear, and from my midsection. But it was a great trip, and my love of backpacking has been rekindled after 30 years of dormancy.


devil's club

Ultimately, I want to get this particular set of gear down to something more like 35-40# with food. And Levi is in the same boat, in addition to needing to replace his boots. We just talked a couple of days ago, and decided that we aren’t ready for this hunt, this month. But, with a year to get ready, and a better idea of what we’re dealing with, we’ll be ready next fall for sure, and in the meantime, I’m going to apply the lightweight, bivouac style camping to my local deer and elk hunting this fall.


paintbrush flower of some kind


Santiago and cityscape

I recently got totally fed up with iPhoto as a photo managing tool, and decided to switch to Adobe Lightroom instead. Unfortunately, as is the case with most software upgrades and changes, there was something of a steep learning curve involved, and it took a while to figure out how to make it work, and, more importantly, how to make it export photos to Flickr. I think I have a handle on it now, and spent this morning sorting through my pics from GGSKS a couple of weeks ago. All my decent GGSKS pics can be seen here at my Flickr page.


tower

Until the incident at Netarts Bay last fall, I hadn’t given much thought to going after the BCU five star award. After the ass-kicking that was handed to me at Netarts, I decided I needed to rethink that. So when I saw that a five star training was being offered at Golden Gate Sea Kayaking Symposium this year, I decided I needed to go.


paddling back

The regular symposium ran Friday through Sunday, and the five star training ran Monday through Wednesday. I couldn’t afford to be away for the whole time, so I arrived Sunday morning, and Santiago and Morag Brown and I went for a nice paddle out to Point Bonita and back, and got a little taste of what an ebbing tide at Golden Gate feels like. Paddling back around Lime Point under the bridge was a bit of a workout, and we were only dealing with about half of the max current for that day. We filed that one away for future worrying.


bridge and kayakers

Monday morning we met in the class room and talked about what we were hoping to get out of the class, and then we geared up and got on the water.

We paddled up into the bay towards Angel Island, initially hoping to go up through Raccoon Strait and around the island, but by the time we got there there was a pretty solid ebb flowing out of the channel, so we ferry glided across and landed on the south facing side of Angel Island for lunch.


paddling around Alcatrez

After lunch we headed on south towards Alcatrez Island, and around it. I think we had a cooler view of the island than the tourists on the boat were getting.


prison structures, Alcatrez Island


prison structures, Alcatrez Island

We finally got back to the marina and spent a little time in the classroom again, and then headed back out after dark for some night navigation exercises. All told, it turned out to be about a 12 hour day. I got home to where I was staying in Fairfax around 10:30. I was so happy to find a working hot tub out behind the house!


Night Navigation

The next day we started out talking about and practicing towing, and then headed out under the bridge for some rescue and towing practice in amongst the rocks.


paddling under

Then we headed over to the nearby beach to practice landing an incapacitated paddler in the surf, something I had never tried. I don’t have any good pictures of me getting yanked out of my kayak in the impact zone by a too-short tow rope, sorry…


looking west

After lunch, and some group photos, we saddled up again and headed back upstream. I knew that our timing was such that we were going to end up going around Lime Point against the full strength of a 4.75 knot ebb current, so I was starting to play it safe and conserve my energy. I had seen it at about half that level of current on Sunday, and wasn’t really sure what to expect today, at max ebb, except harder work.


BCU Five Star training course

On the way back we stopped to do some more rock garden play, and to practice landing and launching ourselves on and of the rocks, another thing that I had never really done before.


landing on rocks exercise


landing on rocks exercise


landing on rocks exercise


landing on rocks exercise

After we were done swimming around and climbing on the rocks, we headed back towards home, stopping at Lime Point just long enough to get tasked with one more exercise for the day: towing an incapacitated paddler around the point, into the current. My group initially tried a rafted tow with two people towing it, but we got all tangled up and pushed up against the rocks, and had to break it all apart and wash back out to try again. This time they broke us up into two simple tows, and with a hell of a lot of work, I finally made it around with my tow, trying as hard as I could to stay right on the rip line the whole way. And so ended day two…


headed home

The last day we spent on land, working on navigation problems with UK charts and current data, and going over kit and scenarios. Eventually I’m sure the UK tidal data will become something I’m comfortable with, but so far, it doesn’t make intuitive sense to me yet. I need to get some books and practice more.


end of the day

Since I had driven all this way, and hadn’t been to SF in many, many years, I took an extra day after the course to drive over the bridge, instead of just paddling around underneath it, and spend a little time in the city. My mission was to find some of the wild conures that live there, and that the wonderful documentary “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill” was made about. I had heard that they had expanded in numbers, and no longer were primarily seen in the Telegraph Hill area. I didn’t know anyone personally who had succeeded in finding them, but I figured it was worth a try, so I parked just outside the Presidio and started walking into it. I saw a small group of them almost immediately, but flying far off in the distance. Forty five minutes later, I found a pair hanging out near the YMCA, and watched them for a while until they flew off. I followed in the direction they had gone, and a few minutes later I caught up to them, and sat like a bird-nerd tourist for a half hour or so, watching them with binoculars. And no, I was not able to get a single decent picture of them. What I would have given for a good telephoto lens on the Canon!

I did drive over to the Coit Tower, just to see if there might be some over there, but no luck. And with that, my SF trip was over, and I headed home, stopping in Sacramento to visit some friends.

As soon as I got home, I registered for a San Juan Currents class with Body Boat Blade on Orcas Island. I need to get out more!


overexposed!


early morning waterfall

After missing opportunities to go steelhead fishing for most of the winter, I finally made it down to Brian’s place Wednesday night. We got up at six the next morning and were on the water at daybreak, kayaking down the Nehalem River looking for steelhead.


ice

It was really, really cold all morning. Ice would form on the paddle and the kayak, and the guides on the poles would be iced up in a few minutes each time I stopped fishing. Cold water like this does not make for great steelhead fishing, and it didn’t help that the water was low and very clear. Amazingly, I made it through the whole run without losing a single piece of gear. I guess I’ve gotten way better at getting hooks unstuck. Wearing a drysuit helps a lot. Under the drysuit, I was wearing three pairs of socks, and three layers of polypro and wool long underwear, and a heavy fleece jacket and it was just about perfect. My hands got cold, but that was it.


cobble beach

Most of the spots that Brian was hoping to stop and fish at already had people in them, so we had to pass up some pretty nice water and keep on going. But around midday, Brian hooked one on the first cast into a new pool. It was a nice, bright fish, but a native, so not a keeper. We let him go as quickly as possible, so no pics of that one, sorry!

Other than that little bit of fishy excitement, it was a pretty uneventful, but beautiful and relaxing day on the river.


pool


riffles


Nehalem River

The year is nearly over now, so here’s another lengthy blog post to catch up.


Frost

There was still a weekend of classes left at the Lumpy Waters Symposium after the Friday surf class that my previous blog post covered. On Saturday, Karl and I taught a class for beginners to get used to rock gardening, and rescuing each other in that environment, and we got to play in a little surf at the end of the day, too. The mouth of the Salmon River in Oregon is a really, really beautiful place. I will definitely go back there again sometime.


getting out

On Sunday, Amanda I and I led a small group of beginners on a trip to the Three Arches Rocks at Oceanside. There was a strong northwest swell and a building north wind, so we stayed on the south side of the rocks, but we did get to check out the largest arch, and get a little taste of the swell and wind.


checking out the big arch

Once the last Road Scholar trip of the year was over, I moved into the early deer season and started hunting every afternoon. I actually took a shot at a deer this year, for the first time ever, but missed. Mostly, what I brought home every day was chanterelles, which were plenty tasty, but not venison!


chanterelles

I also hunted all eleven days of elk season this year, and got close to elk a few times, but not close enough to see my way to a good shot, and I ended the elk season empty handed, too, except for some great pictures and more chanterelles.


forest

Next year, for elk season, I’m putting together a small posse, instead of going it alone again. It’s nearly impossible to push an elk towards you, when you’re hunting alone.


Devil's Club


busy beavers were here

I hunted all four days of late deer season, too, but got faked out by an older, smarter buck, who waited for me to sneak past him, and then doubled back around behind me and vanished. I guess that’s why he’s a four point now.


frozen!


Looking down at Skamokawa valleys


smoked turkey

We went to Seattle again for Thanksgiving, and for fun, we took the ferry over to Bremerton on the way home.


downtown Seattle

The weekend after Thanksgiving is when the Solstice Forge Hammer-In is every year, with good food, beer and coal fired fun.


Solstice Forge Hammer-In, November 26, 2011

The timber company that owns the land behind me sent a crew in this fall to clean ditches and maintain roads. They took out a bunch of alder along the road where it passes through my land, so I borrowed the Farmi logging winch from my neighbor Krist and spent a few afternoons bucking and skidding firewood logs into a pile in the pasture. I think I may have about four or five cords of firewood there when I get it all split and stacked. I sure love the Farmi winch. Someday I need to own one of these.


Tractor Logging with the Farmi winch


Firewood


Tractor and Farmi logging winch

Way back last February, when Alice and I were on our way back from visiting colleges, my beloved, well-worn Subaru started making horrible engine noises, and when I got home, I parked it with the suspicion that it had a timing belt pulley going bad.

I ended up driving the Mercedes all summer, and putting the Subaru on the back burner, but then in early November, Shannon flipped and totaled her Toyota when she hit some black ice on KM Mountain. I ended up giving her the Mercedes to get back and forth to town, and finally was forced into dealing with the Subaru.


Bad bearing

It turned out I was right about the timing belt, and a couple of days and $300 later, I had my Subaru back on the road again. I am so happy to have this car back, with its ipod capable stereo, heavy duty roof rack, working cruise control and all wheel drive. Yay!


new timing belt

OK, so by now, much of the PNW kayaking community has probably heard the news that “something” happened this past weekend at the Lumpy Waters Symposium. What follows is my incident report for what happened Friday, October 14th at the mouth of Netarts Bay.

First off, this is by no means a comprehensive incident report. There were four instructors, twelve students, and countless first responders from multiple agencies, and each one of those people will have their own perspective on this incident. This is simply the clearest picture I can put together, based on what I remember about that day. I’m aware that my memories are not going to be perfect. Far from it, in fact. My perceptions of what was going on at any moment were filtered by adrenaline and whatever kinds of psychological phenomena are common to an event like this. Time, for example, got bent all out of shape. If you had asked me when I landed how long I had been out there, I would have said maybe a half an hour or forty minutes, when, in reality, it was nearly two hours from the time things started going bad to the time I landed on the beach again.

Please feel free to comment, especially if you were there. All comments on this blog are moderated by me, so if I get one of those “what a bunch of idiots” type of comments, it will never see the light of day, so don’t bother. But if you have anything useful or illuminating to add, please feel free to do so. If you have any photos of this event that you’re willing to share here, email me and I’ll add them to this entry.


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I arrived at Lumpy Waters HQ at noon on Friday, just in time to slap together a sandwich and make it to the coaches’ meeting, where we got the basic layout for the weekend, and were shown a variety of available venues on Google Earth on the overhead projector. As soon as the meeting was over, Sean, the other lead instructor for the class that I was to be teaching that afternoon, introduced himself, and said that we were going to take our Long Boat Surfing class to the mouth of Netarts Bay, a venue I had never been to before.

I had never met Sean before, but Sean and one of the other assistants, Jamie, are well known names in the world of kayak surfing, and I have only been teaching beginners to surf kayaks for a couple of years. Even so, I asked why we would drive so far when there was a nice surf beach right out in front of the resort where the event was based. He told me that he and the other coaches had already checked it out, and that beach was “dumpy” right then, meaning the waves were not particularly well suited to surfing, and especially not conducive to long rides, which Sean was hoping to be able to offer the students in our class. Since it was brought up in the coaches’ meeting that the tide was going to be ebbing that afternoon, I was concerned, since river mouths are known to be unfriendly places to be on an ebb tide, but I assumed that these guys must have known something about this particular situation and venue that I didn’t and so I didn’t challenge the choice of venue any further. This was a huge mistake on my part. I should have realized that I didn’t need to be an expert kayak surfer to know that the mouth of a river or bay is a dangerous place to be on an ebb.

Even though I didn’t speak up out loud, in my head I was already getting concerned, and I went and picked up the laminated charts and satellite photos of the venue that Alder Creek provided for the coaches, and brought them along to look at. What I saw wasn’t making me feel any better.



We met up with our students, and got everyone oriented to the plan, and started getting kayaks and people sorted out and loaded on trailers and roof racks. There were two students in their own van who already had their kayaks loaded up, and were going to wait out by the highway for us. What I didn’t realize until later is that they then asked if they could go on ahead and meet us at Netarts, and they were told that would be OK. After a bit, we had a trailer loaded up with kayaks, but people were scattered about in personal cars, and it was very hard to get an accurate sense of whether or not everyone who needed a ride for themselves or their kayaks had one. Eventually, I had to just assume that people would take care of themselves in that way, and we hit the road, but now I was starting to feel kind of edgy. I guess I’m just more of a control freak than that, and I was not comfortable with the feeling that we were only very loosely organized, and kind of rushing off towards a venue that I had never seen before and wasn’t even sure how to get to.

That said, I was trying to keep an open mind about it. I know that there are many different ways of teaching and organizing and leading groups, and since I had not worked with this particular group of coaches before, I wanted to stay as open to learning new things as I could, and tried to keep my edgy, inner control freak in check. After all, out of the four of us, I was pretty sure I was the least experienced in big surf conditions.

We arrived at the beach at Happy Camp, near the town of Netarts somewhat before 2 PM. I had to deal with some gear that I had not had time to put on before we left, and get the trailer and van parked, and I wanted to spend a few minutes watching the surf on the spit across the water from where we were parked. I would have rather spent a lot longer doing that, but it seemed like people were eager to get going, since it was the afternoon, and the first session of the weekend. I’m used to getting out of the vehicles as a group, observing conditions for a while, and then making a decision about the venue before even unloading the trailer, but the two guys who had left ahead of us were already unloaded and geared up and ready to go when we arrived, and that added to the feeling that I needed to hurry up and get this class started. I did look at the tide book, though, since nobody seemed sure exactly when high tide would be. To my dismay, I realized that we would be starting our class just after the tide had turned and was starting to ebb.

By the time I got down to the beach, the groups had already been split into two, and I met up with my group of five students, and Richard, my assistant, who, as it turned out, was the only one of the four coaches who had been to that venue before. I did the usual introductions, checking on prior experience and medical issues with the students, but didn’t get to do the whole pre-trip protocol that I am used to doing.

I reiterated the risks of the ebb tide, and laid out the plan for our group. We would stay in close to the bay, at the north end of the spit, surfing into the bay right up by the spit, and using the deeper green water to return back to a starting position to surf again, always being aware of position and what the ebb was doing to us. The plan for any wet exits and swimmers was to wash up on the spit, sort one’s self out and start out again, as is usually the plan at more “normal” surf venues where I have taught classes before. I did state that it was likely that we would be ending the class session somewhere near the peak of the ebb current, and it would be very important to be mindful of that. October 14th was shortly after the full moon, so the tides would be especially strong.

With that, we got on the water, and as I got in my kayak, I had a very clear, bad feeling about this place, and reminded myself that I would have to be VERY careful to keep everyone as tight to the end of the spit as possible, and to keep very close tabs on the group. We got on the water right around 2:15 PM.



As soon as we crossed the deep channel and arrived on the “surfy” side, I realized that I had my work cut out for me. Richard and a couple of the students caught a couple of rides, and I positioned myself about in the middle of the area we were going to surf, but just to the north, along the edge of the deep water, where I hoped I could keep an eye on things and catch anyone who was getting drifted out towards the sea, and the much larger surf break on the outside.

It was obvious right away that this was going to be a very hard job to do. I was doing head counts repeatedly, and often having a hard time seeing many of the students as they were hidden on the fronts of waves that I was looking at the backs of. The conditions were a little bigger, even where we were towards the inside, than many of the students were able to manage well. It was around this time, maybe near 2:30 or so, that Sean’s group got on the water, and headed towards the bigger waves outside of us, to the west of our position.

One of my students went upstream, into the bay, around this time, and I saw Richard go after her to see what was up. Another student had a minor capsize nearby, his second already, and I went to rescue him. I had just gotten him sorted out when Richard came by and said that the upstream student, Setsuko, had gone over there to pump some water out of her cockpit that had sloshed in when she launched. She was fine. I turned around to see that two of my students, Dave and Steve, had moved pretty far to the west while I was doing the rescue. One seemed to be headed that way intentionally, so Richard said that he would go out and bring them back inside. He headed out that way, and I was trying to do a head count of my group. I realized that we were all drifting to the west much faster than I had expected, and I turned around to see if I could see Richard, Dave and Steve behind me, when I saw a much larger set of waves come through and capsize multiple students from both classes all at once.

I’m not sure how many people ended up in the water at that time, but I remember thinking that it looked like a lot of loose boats and swimmers, and I could no longer see many of the students from either group, including Steve and Dave, or Richard. I started heading out to see if I could pick up any swimmers and bring them back to the east, and hopefully land them on the spit. I saw Shay and Donna’s boats go surfing past me, empty. Donna’s boat was closer to me, so I headed in that direction, hoping to find her. She still had her paddle and was waving it in the air, and I found her pretty quickly.

Donna was actively swimming with her paddle towards shore, and I picked her up and started towing her, with her hanging onto my end toggle. This was the beginning of a long, hard pile of work for me that wouldn’t end for nearly two hours.

Donna and I were working our way east, trying to get back to the smaller surf, and the north end of the spit, but by now we were well outside of where we had intended to stay, and the waves were bigger out there. I did what I could to back off of the waves and not surf them, but every now and then I would get caught on one and surf down it at high speed, either right side up, or often upside down after getting broached. Donna would let go and I would eventually get to the end of the ride, roll up if I was upside down, and go back to find her and start it over again. These upside down sessions were frequent, and I often had to stay under for much longer than I am used to, and it was hard to stay put and not panic. But I always managed to stay in and roll back up. One particularly big wave surprised me and as I surfed away the end toggle on my stern broke away and stayed in Donna’s hand. Now I had no good way for her to hang on and be towed, so I asked her if she was comfortable climbing on the back deck of my kayak, but she didn’t seem too keen on that, and given how often I was already getting knocked down, I didn’t force the issue, and we kept plodding on, with her now just holding onto my rear perimeter lines.

Somewhere around this time, I thought that a mayday call to the Coast Guard was in order. I had no idea how many, if any, students had made it to dry land, but I knew that those of us who were still out here were probably going to need outside assistance. I pulled out my radio a couple of times, but immediately had to drop it again to paddle or brace, and after a couple of tries I gave it up and put it away again. I knew that if I did make contact with the Coast Guard, they would want to keep talking to me, and I knew that was not going to work in the situation I was in.

By now, I could see Jamie off to the north a little ways, carrying Shay on his back deck, and also getting thrashed and surfed and frequently capsized. He was trying to make it back to the beach on the north side of the river, paddling a steep ferry angle to the ENE, a path that hopefully would get us out of the surf zone and into deeper water. I tried that for a while, too, but we were near a crab buoy that showed us the unhappy fact that for a long time, we were making no headway at all. So I decided to go back to trying to paddle to the end of the spit, a path that took us back into heavy breakers, where Donna and I took more heavy beatings from the sea, and I repeatedly spent untold long seconds upside down wishing desperately for air to breathe. But, I could see that we were slowly pulling away from the crab buoy at last and actually starting to make some forward progress towards dry land, so I kept at it. Sometime in this time frame, I heard sirens over by Netarts and eventually saw flashing lights approaching the beach.

Somewhere around this time, Sean appeared from somewhere to the southwest, towing Shay’s empty kayak. We were pretty far from Shay and Jamie now and he offered Donna the empty kayak. She was only too happy to accept. I warned her that Shay’s kayak was an LV model, meaning lower volume and smaller cockpit opening, but she said something to the effect of “I don’t care, at least it’s a kayak!”. I carefully brought her alongside, and left her in Sean’s care, while he helped her into the kayak, and I went back in the direction of where I had last seen Jamie and Shay, hoping to help them.

I found them pretty close to where I had left them, but a little further west, and in some much, much larger breakers than before. I was trying to figure out how to help, and if it would even be possible to tow them, when a very large wave broke on them, capsizing Jamie and burying Shay in a mountain of water. Jamie came up pretty far down the wave, and so I went to Shay to pick her up and try to keep her moving towards the beach. She was exhausted and sounded scared, so I tried to sound calm myself, although I doubt that I did a very good job of it. Because by now, I was pretty scared too. I had never been in this kind of large, heavy and unfriendly surf for so long before, and had never had to rescue anyone out of conditions like that, and I was not really sure what to do now except for “keep trying”, so that’s what I did.

Shay couldn’t climb on my back deck anymore. She said her legs were cramped, and that her drysuit had leaked somewhere and had water inside of it. She has a lean build, and I knew that if her suit had leaked, she was not likely to be able to weather that kind of cold and wet very well, for very long. So I paddled and towed her, and pretty soon Jamie was back and clipped a tow line onto my kayak and we started to make a little better progress. But we were still getting thrashed pretty regularly, and Shay came loose several times. Then I saw Jamie get surfed away, felt a lurch and then there was no more tow line attached. He had clipped into my front toggle, and not the perimeter lines, and now my front toggle was gone as well.

I kept on paddling, and soon Jamie was back, and was getting into position to clip on again, when large wave picked me up pretty high, and the last thing I saw before I was broached and capsized, was the bow of my boat pointing down the wave, right at Jamie’s back. I didn’t have time to yell before I was upside down, and felt myself sliding down the wave, and then I felt my boat stop for a second, before going on. This was one of the most horrible moments of the day for me. I knew that I had hit Jamie, or his kayak, and I was hoping that I had not badly injured him, or worse. This also was one of my longest rides upside down, and I had to fight the urge to panic and come out really, really hard. Eventually I was able to brace up enough to grab a mouthful of salty, foamy air, which let me hang on until I could roll all the way up. I saw Jamie upright and felt a wave of relief, although I could tell that he was hurting. I knew I must have hit his body somewhere.

This time, he was closer to Shay, and he picked her up and continued paddling, and I stayed close, but not too close, as a backup. I was getting really tired by this point, and my throat was burning from the salt water that I had been swallowing and breathing in. By now, I had been capsized by large surf waves at least a dozen or more times, and had had to force myself to stay in, ride it out and roll, and not become another swimmer without a kayak. I knew that if I could stay in my kayak, I would be able to take care of myself, and still possibly be able to help other people, but if I flinched and came out, I would be useless, and in big trouble myself. So I just kept staying in.

It was around this time that I had the second awful moment of the day. Off to the south a little ways, I saw Sean’s green kayak floating upside down. This meant that Sean was also now a swimmer, and possibly Donna, too, who he was with when I had last seen him. I didn’t see them anywhere. But, awful feelings aside, I saw his kayak as something I could maybe use to help Shay and Jamie, so I flipped it upright, clipped into and towed it back towards them. I was really hoping we could put Shay in this boat, hand her my spare paddle, which was miraculously still on my front deck, and we could all get the hell out of there. I don’t know what I was thinking, honestly. I got back to them and realized right away that Shay was in no condition to even sit upright in a kayak anymore, let alone paddle one in these waves.

As I was sitting there for a moment, trying to decide how to be the most useful I could be, a large wave came up under me and I instinctively backed off of it, but of course the empty, now-capsized kayak that I was clipped into couldn’t do that, and it was instantly caught and surfed by this large wave, which instantly capsized me, since the line was wrapped under my kayak and now I was upside down and being dragged sideways underwater. This, of course, is EXACTLY why you’re not supposed to tow a kayak in the surf. I knew this, intellectually. Now I know it for real. Fortunately, I’ve actually practiced releasing a tow while upside down, and I popped my tow belt loose and rolled back up. Jamie, Shay and the green kayak were all nowhere to be seen for a few long moments.

After clearing my head a little, I saw Jamie and Shay back behind me, and I started back to help, or at least be a backup if she fell off again. The green kayak came into view again, too, with my towline attached, but now I was very reluctant to get anywhere near it if it wasn’t going to be an asset somehow. Sometime around now, Sean suddenly appeared again, from the southwest, paddling Shay’s kayak. He asked me how I was doing, and I told him I was tired. He told me to head for the beach and he would go with me. I told him I was fine to make the beach alone, and that he should try to help Jamie and Shay instead. So he headed back towards them, and I headed for the beach, on the north side of the river, to the west of where we launched. As I got clear of the breakers and into deeper water, I could finally see the scene on the beach, and I was very much relieved to see many kayaks there, and many people at the water’s edge in kayaking gear. And sheriff’s vehicles. And flashing lights.

I landed on the beach a hundred yards or more to the west of where everyone was, as the current was really strong by now, and I miscalculated my ferry angle. I got out, stood up and nearly fell back down again. My boat had about four or five inches of water in it by now, and I had a hard time lifting it up to dump it out. People came running at me, and now I had a different set of leadership problems. There were ten students on the beach, but there were differing opinions as to how many people we had in our class, all told. I insisted it was sixteen, and in the end, it turned out I was right, but not for the reasons I thought. Our original roster had twelve students and four instructors, but what I didn’t know is that one of the students was a no-show, and someone else had come along to take pictures. Much confusion ensued while that discrepancy was sorted out. I knew we had a written roster, but I had handed it to Sean before we launched and didn’t know where it had ended up. It turned out he had tucked it under the wiper blades of his truck, which was not a bad place for it to be, but none of us knew that. And, as far as I know, it still had the no-show student listed on it, and not the photographer.

It turned out that everyone but all four coaches, Donna and Shay had arrived safely at the beach, pretty early on. Sean had told Fred the photographer to make the call for outside help, which he did when he landed, with a borrowed cell phone. Donna and Richard had managed to make it to the spit, but Donna had been unable to fit in Shay’s kayak, so she swam the whole way in with Richard’s help and he stayed with her there until it was all over. Dave was standing on top of the sheriff’s truck with binoculars, spotting for the rescuers. He later told me that even from that vantage point, if he didn’t have the binoculars pointed right at us when we crested the waves occasionally, he never would have known for sure where we were.

Soon after I landed, the jetskis from the Netarts Fire and Rescue went zooming past, and in short order they delivered a very wobbly and cold Shay safely to the beach, where she was taken away in an ambulance to warm up. They retrieved Donna from the spit, and managed to recover her kayak, too. But Shay’s kayak was not recovered. From what I heard, it had been holed somewhere along the way, and was swamped when Sean paddled it up to us near the end. He ended up switching back into his green kayak to return to the beach, and let Shay’s kayak go.

We eventually were all together again on the beach, the rescuers wrapped up their affairs and departed, all the remaining kayaks were carried back up to the parking lot and loaded up, and we had a short debriefing session in the parking lot, minus Shay, who was in an ambulance somewhere. We returned to Lumpy Waters HQ just before 7 PM where everyone was merrily drinking beer and people started asking me how my day had gone. Obviously, very few people had heard about it yet.


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I’ve already debriefed this with many of the participants, in a group and individually. The most important thing I have to say is still, “I’m sorry! We NEVER should have taken you there!” And of course, this apology extends as well to the people who trained me as a leader and coach. I was trained better than this. I know better than this. But I ended up second guessing my own knowledge and experience, and automatically deferring to people of a higher skill level than I thought myself to be. I should have challenged this plan, based only on the simple fact that the mouth of a river or bay is a dangerous place to be on a strong ebb tide. I shouldn’t have needed to say anything more than that.

Ironically, when I sat down that evening for a few minutes with Sean, I brought this up to him. He told me that as we were driving north towards Netarts, past McPhillips beach, he was looking down there and thinking, “that looks like a pretty nice spot, maybe we should have gone there instead,” but since we had already let some of the students go on ahead, we had no way to recall them and change plans. I told him that I had looked at that same beach as we drove past, and thought the same thing, but just assumed that there must be some kind of good reason we weren’t going there, and just kept driving.

Donna and Shay are both fine, although Shay took a little while to warm up and return to the event. Donna was back in her kayak the next day with the kayak fishing class, successfully tending crab traps. Shay showed up later Friday night, and was far more forgiving of our serious lapse in judgement than I was, and grateful for our efforts on her behalf. Shay had been a star pupil in our beginning “Fear to Fun” classes the previous year, and I wince inside a little bit when I remember that the very next time I was on the water with her it was not very much Fun and instead a lot more about Fear. Jamie DID get hit in the back, just below the PFD, by the bow of my kayak. By some miracle he was not seriously injured, but he was sore for days. Friday night, I felt pretty good physically, but was very tired. The next morning, though, I felt like I had been run over by a truck. I was sore all over, and stayed sore for a few days afterwards.

Today, I was back on the water with Elderhostel clients, paddling in a quiet slough, when the sound of a siren on the adjacent highway made me jump, and I was instantly back in the surf trying to rescue Donna and Shay, and hearing sirens on shore. I think I’ve got a tiny little inkling now of what PTSD actually means.

Ever since the infamous “Eco-Chicks” trip of 2008, I’ve repeatedly said that the lesson I took away from that fiasco was that I should never lead a trip that I didn’t get to plan. For whatever boneheaded reason, I ignored that rule last Friday. We were very lucky that the outcome was not worse than it was.