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August, 2005
Old Dog, Short Boat
By Patti Rutka Stevens
"Don, what's side surfi—?" I bellered over the Chatooga's churning noise and froth just as I leaned upstream in the seventeen foot Tripper. Don Smelliot, my formidable Outward Bound instructor extraordinaire, had just turned the boat sideways into a hole I really didn't think I wanted to be in. My words were cut short with the capsize, as the boat spit me out of the bow and we swam downstream. I fished for the painter, trying to at least exercise the self-rescue skills I had been learning on the Outward Bound staff training down south in May of 1988.
I got the "side" part that day, but not the "surfing" part, despite Don's desire to teach it to me experientially, in true Outward Bound fashion. "It's FUN!" he had shouted to me as I dutifully frog-paddled with my feet sticking up, towing the Tripper-turned-submarine. I think I missed the instruction about bracing during that training. Still, I persevered and came to love boating downriver with the enthusiasm of a dog sticking its head out the car window, tongue flapping in the breeze, nose sniffing the airflow. With time and more swims I learned to surf, and reveled in reading the curls and peaks and V's on glittering sun and blue-sky days. Even rainy days made paddling clearly superior to my other sport, rock climbing.
I had learned from the first failed side surfing experiment, and I felt safe in a boat the size of that Tripper, safe enough to take one down the Rio Grande in the fall of 1989. December of 1990 saw me in a decked version of the same make, specially outfitted by Old Town, for thirty days on the Colorado through the Grand Canyon. After a nasty swim at about 15,000 cfs in which I forgot to pull the spray skirt and ended up wriggling out of the cockpit, skirt still attached to the boat, I knew I had been plucked out by my river angel. The swim in the class six (on a scale of ten) rapid unnerved me enough so that I swapped out with paddling mate Ellen to finish the river in a small leaky raft which had said "Hello" on its bow when it was new. Because the paint was wearing off and the raft didn't hold its air well, it read more like "Jell-O," and I was content in the safety of the squishy boat the rest of the trip. I dabbled in subsequent years in larger inflatables, coming to trust the maneuverability and stability of a Shredder, but I inevitably found myself buying shorter and shorter hard boats over the years in my paddling travels.
The Outward Bound staff training had warped me into becoming a purist, inculcating the belief that one blade was better than two, and an open boat was more manly (never mind I was a girl) than a decked boat. "Half the stick, twice the chick," as we hard-girls used to say. For years I suffered on my knees, bailing at first in my thirteen-foot Perception HD-1, the boat with possibly the least primary stability ever created. When I got tired of bailing and overcame my twitchiness about getting out of a boat with a skirt, I switched to an old Phoenix fiberlastic C-1 (about the same length), and then next a New Wave Cruise Control kayak converted to C-1 at ten and a half feet. Though graceful in super-ball-pattern blue, it was a pig-boat, making cuts more slowly than the HD-1.
Finally, after I had left whitewater heaven near the West Virginia area and moved up to God's country in Maine, I switched over to the dark side in 1998 at Limington Rips on the Saco. I trained for kayak in an Acrobat 270 at nine feet-something, a boat I'll probably be the most fond of when I hang up the PFD. It had a tri-hull, which wiggled under me and threw me in more ways than one, as I worked to learn what to do with the blade on the other side of the paddle shaft. (I still believe the C-1 roll is easier than the kayak roll.) I would have been happy to retire in that boat, despite my seventeen-year-old boating buddy Taylor calling it "retro." For heaven's sake, it was only about ten years old! But it was old enough, and UV-d enough, to open up a heart-rending crack in the stern last year as I dinked around on the Dead at 1300 and smacked a rock on an eddy turn. If only the boat had been two feet shorter... I would never have hit that rock. Right. Time to think short boat.
Plastic repairs lasted most of the summer, but the boat's mortality was inevitable. • I started demo-ing boats half the size, hearing short boats practically did the paddling for a person. A little red Flirt was cute and clever, and I tried a comfy Riot Turbo, all from the generous Suncook River Canoe and Kayak in Center Barnstead, NH. But at 44 I did not expect to be swapping anything, certainly not ends, or doing what just a few short years ago was referred to as rodeo boating; I'm not even sure it's called that anymore. I just wanted to paddle down river and do a little surfing, yes, even side surfing, and not get the bewiggies scared out of me. Oh, and easy rolling and easy carrying would be nice, I thought, especially with my arthritis from all the years of carrying that HD-1 (the falls during the rock climbing years probably didn't help my bones and ligaments either.)
In pool sessions over the winter I settled on the Jackson Fun at six-plus feet. There was a lot of hype around it last summer, so I was cautious, but the boat was so easy to roll and so very light to carry that I picked one up for good come spring. Just in time for the Dead at who-knows-what volume because of all the rain.
So there I was a few weeks back, wondering if I could sneak Mile Long on the right at something over 6000 (no one really knows for sure) because even though I'd paddled this river more than any other over eighteen years of boating, I really couldn't quite get the feel of having several feet less boat both in front of me and behind me. Where'd my boat go? When I reached the paddle back to pry, it stuck farther out behind the boat than the boat was long.. .hmm, what could that mean for big waves? Is that why people had been telling me it would be great to keep the Acrobat for the Kennebec? And could someone please remind me again exactly why the bottom of the boat is so freakin' flat? I thought curves were good. But hey, I did get my off-side roll almost as easily as the on-side in the Jackson, something I never thought this old paddle-dog could learn.
I suppose I'll get used to the boat, around about the end of the season, and maybe I'll come to love this one the most for all its obvious advantages. But at this rate, I might also just move next to a boogie board until I'm sixty, and then by eighty-five I'll be sporting hand paddles and flippers down the Ottawa. Less is more. Woof.
Patti Rutka Stevens is the author of the upcoming self-healing memoir Good As Gold: Coming Off Meds, and writes in her spare time when she's not boating in her spare time. Names in this article have been changed to protect the innocence of the characters.
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