I was feeling pretty good about things for most of the day. I’d proven that I had good rhythm and could comfortably hold an even paddling pace; the temperature was relatively warm so being in and out of the river wasn’t unpleasant; we’d established a basic series of commands (“Switch! Paddle hard!”) and were increasingly comfortable with each other and confident in our abilities as we navigated tight corners and unexpected obstacles in the thready upper East Branch. We even dried out a bit as the river slowly deepened and we spent longer periods of time in the boat instead of dragging it over the shallows.
About lunchtime, we came up on an island. To the right was a wide, very shallow channel that would mean getting out of the boat five yards in and walking for an indeterminate period of time. To the left was a deep, slightly narrower channel with a quick turn right at the entrance to avoid a large log lying parallel to the river along the bank. We weren’t moving quickly, our feet were dry, and a pair of geese bobbed down the left hand side looking perfectly content and coming nowhere near the log… so we went left. We figured we could make the turn.
We didn’t make the turn.
The current picked up, the stern caught in an unexpected eddy, and we bumped broadside up against the log. Before either of us could sneak in a second curse, the boat was upside down.
We had established early on that if the boat ever flips, Steve wants my priority to be “save the canoe”. (He says if he survives and his boat doesn’t, he’ll have to kill me. We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.) Since the water was only waist-deep and Steve was clearly capable of self-rescue, I immediately latched onto the canoe and through a combination of dumb luck and grinding my knees into the rocky river bottom, I managed to pin the boat against a half-fallen tree jutting into the water a few yards downstream.
Our gear had been tightly stowed in the canoe and neither of us lost our paddle in the flip, so Steve sloshed over and pulled our portage packs loose as they began to float, tossing them on shore as I braced a very large canoe against a tree in a very stiff current. With every bag that was removed, the more the boat tried to pull away and barrel downstream.
Suddenly Steve was gone. My Irish Catholic guilt made me immediately assume he was so pissed that he’d invited an incompetent, boat-flipping moron along on his epic river adventure that he’d decided to abandon me right there. As the gunnels creaked and I dug my feet deeper into the mud, I contemplated the moral complications of stealing the very expensive kevlar canoe of a man who left you to drown under a strainer. Peering over the top edge of the increasingly-wobbly boat/tree/paddler pile, I saw Steve sprinting down the river… and then lunging into the current after his hat.
Chapeau recovered, Steve returned to my rescue and I tossed him a painter line just before the canoe tried to roll again and knock me under with it. We dragged the whole shebang ashore and stood dripping for a moment, staring stupidly at one another, me figuring I was about to get reamed a new one for upending our transport.
Lucky for me, he just started giggling and began pouring water out of the thwart bags. Our portage packs were fully watertight and all the gear (save what we were wearing) was bone dry; all in all, we’d soaked an open bag of trail mix and lost two Nalgene bottles to the river. (We spent the rest of the trip hoping to find them, but no luck.)
Oh, and it turned out we only had one dry bag that had a hole in it. It happened to be the one containing my phone. Karma’s a real bitch.