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May/June, 2005
Guide of the Month: Joe Apicella
By Paul Dzurec
Joe Apicella, river manager at New England Outdoor Center (NEOC) answers the phone at his house in Harpswell, Maine with a cheerful and smiling (you can hear the smile) voice, "Joe and Paula’s BEAUTIFUL house in the woods; how may I help you?" It forces the caller to smile, too, and gives even telemarketers a treat. Joe is this month’s "No Umbrella Guide of the Month."
Joe got involved in rafting after Andrew Weegar, with whom he worked at Homeward Bound, an outdoor program that focuses on troubled youth, asked him to help fill up a raft with paddlers during Kennebec guide training in 1983. "He had me come up to help fill up a boat during training. It was such a blast - I went up for two days, and ended staying for 20 years."
"My first three [rafting] trips were all training runs," Joe reported during our interview. But training runs may not be for the faint of heart. "First I went down with Marlene. She was just becoming a guide. She did something at Magic [Falls rapid], she didn’t even know what, and she ended up with 11 stitches in the back of her head."
Many guide candidates would be discouraged at seeing bloodshed to the extent Joe did on his first day. "The next day, I went with her again, they wanted strong paddlers. Then she flipped at Magic." At the time, New England only had guide training on weekends, so Marlene had to go back to her real life Monday morning. Joe, at this point hooked, wasn’t going anywhere. He jumped into a Crab Apple boat for the day, paddling in a boat guided by a man named Dave Foss. The excitement continued. “Dave got his feet caught in the guide saver [a rope to keep the guide from falling out] and broke his paddle on the draw. He hit himself in the face and knocked himself unconscious in Magic.” With his feet caught in the guide saver, Dave flopped around in the back, but he and his crew managed to make it through the rapid relatively unscathed.
As Joe’s first three days of guiding attest, rafting in the Greater Forks Metropolitan Area may be a blast, but it’s not worry-free. “The scariest thing I’ve seen is when I saw a guy stuck in a hole on the Dead, behind me. We had to get to shore, knowing there wasn’t much we could do because he was so far out into the river. I got to shore, and started to run up the bank -- he was recirculated in there for 2 minutes or so, but he came out fine, nothing wrong with him.”
In the winter, Joe works as a dive tender on an urchin boat. If everything goes according to plan, weather, boats and divers, “we go out 4 days a week . . . .” Before the state started regulating urchin harvesting heavily “we’d go 18 miles out, towing a skiff, anchor out by Green Island, and the divers would put on their dive clothes, and I’d pull in the totes and clean urchins.” The danger in urchining comes from “Ropes, weather and drifting off. Tending is nerve racking.” On top of that, Joe spends three days a week working at Patagonia in Freeport.
During the summer, Joe drives home at least twice a week to stay with his wife, Paula and his Newfoundland puppy, Tizzy. When Joe drives the two hours up for the next day’s trip, he’s the first one in the office--no later than 6 a.m.
Joe’s guiding role model is Dusty Rhodes, or “Mr. Rhodes,” as Joe calls him, “because he was a teacher of mine in high school, and he married my wife
and me. I can’t call him Dusty, he’s Mr. Rhodes.”
Two years ago Joe was a boatman on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The highlight of the trip was “not my flip at Bedrock! There were big forest fires in California and it made for a spectacular sunset, probably the second best ever. There isn’t one highlight in the Canyon though; it’s the whole place that’s a highlight.”
Joe’s passion for whitewater began in high school, “I raced canoes on the Hudson.” When asked about what kinds of boats he’s owned, Joe laughed, “Sure you want to know? A 17 foot Grumman aluminum canoe. I used to have a Prijon [kayak] that was fiberglass, and then I sold that for the Dancer. In fact, it was a Dancer XT.” Joe rafts now fulltime now, instead of kayaking.
There is one danger in which Joe will not partake, however; that’s naked paddling. Naked paddling through the Cribworks on the Penobscot River on a full moon night is an old New England tradition; but it is not part of Joe’s agenda. “They used to, but not me. Trust me, nobody wants to see THIS naked! Not on my best day. Not even when I was younger!” “I’m a pretty staid, mellow guy . . . . I’ve always wanted to be livelier.”
Joe Apicella FACTS
Born: South Nassau County Hospital, Long Island, NY
College: Cortland State, Cortland NY, and MAT at North Carolina.
Rivers paddled: Tatshenshini, El Sac, Colorado, Snake, in the Tetons, Baton Kill, The Housatonic, The Indian and the Hudson in New York, The Sacandaga – that’s the short list.
Advice for new paddlers and guides: Have fun with it. Don’t get tied up in all the personalities, just enjoy whitewater.
Motto: Do the thing with the information you have, and do what you think is the right thing, then you can’t make a mistake, you might be wrong, but you didn’t make a mistake.
Credentials: First aid, CPR, Wilderness First Responder
Awards won: Ford Punt, Pass and Kick competition when I was a kid for my county
Email nick [at] noumbrella [dot] com with your questions, comments and concerns.
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