For the first morning in several days, we woke up to actual sunshine! The only difficulty was there had been a heavy dew the previous night, so everything that had been left out to dry was actually wetter, but at least we had sunshine!
After breaking camp, we paddled about 100 yards downstream to the mouth of Blacktail canyon. Blacktail is an incredible canyon made up of layers of Tapetes sandstone. As with many narrow side canyons, Blacktail ended with a waterfall. Flattened vegetation and deep rivulets gave evidence of the flood that must have pounded through the narrow canyon after the torrential rainfall.
After leaving the canyon, it was rapid after rapid. Dan swam in Forster and then we both swam in a really swirly "riffle" around mile 124. The third rapid, Fossil, was one of the most exciting of the day - it was a really long rapid with several S-curves. For some reason we didn’t follow our usual order and all of the rafts and kayakers ended up going into the rapid in a bit bunch. Dan flipped early on and ended up swimming. None of the kayakers could quite get to him because we were still in the middle of the rapid, but Dad threw him a throw bag and he and Dan pulled him on to the yellow raft in the middle of the rapid. I am not sure where his boat ended up but I think it was pulled on to a different raft. Shortly after that we stopped for lunch on a small beach. It was sunny, but really windy so it still felt quite cool.
Immediately after lunch was another unnamed rapid with one huge wave and some super-swirly water. It flipped me and I ended up swimming. I popped up, but was sucked back underwater by a massive whirlpool of water – talk about disconcerting! I actually had to kick to get back up to the surface. Tim later told me that while upside down in the kayak there was actually a moment when it looked like my whole boat had been sucked into the vortex – yikes!
The rest of the afternoon was great! We started our new "quick scout" program where we all piled on shore took a 3-5 minute look at the rapid and jumped back in the boats. We went through Specter - no problems remembered, Bedrock - also no problems except that several of the rafts passed quite close to the rock but it made for good film :-)
Next up was Dubendorff . In my opinion, Dubendorff was one of the more impressive rapids on the river. For whatever reason (probably because it had just rained for days and the river was swollen with water), the waves appeared immense and the river wide and turbulent at this particular spot. We spent a bit longer looking at Dubendorff and assessing the best route around the massive hole at the bottom of the rapid on river left. The first plan was to attempt cutting right across the tongue, but on closer look, there was concern that the current within the tongue was too strong and would be very difficult to cross. Instead, we all ended up taking the far more manageable, far right route through Dubendorff - except for Michael who braved the left route and managed to skirt the massive hole on river left. The far right route was still plenty exciting, but it kept us all – rafts and kayakers – well clear of the hole.
We kept going after Dubendorff through several smaller rapids. On our way, we passed the Beckwith group and stopped to ask about Sam's life jacket - which they returned but with no knife. We continued through Granite Narrows which is the canyon’s narrowest point at 76 feet across. It is incredible that this is the narrowest point and the river is still huge! We ended up camping at OC's. It had been one of our longer days and we had covered around 17 miles. Everyone was pretty tired, but we were able to get camp set up and a dinner of fish tacos cooked in no time. Great day!
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