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August, 2006
Raft Guidelines Part III: The early years of the industry
By Scott Phair
Alan Haley is Maine's first registered Whitewater Guide, receiving his license in 1976. It was my privilege to work at Waterville Senior High School with Alan Haley from 2001-04. We did a private trip together with some staff and friends from WSHS in 2003. That trip marked Alan's return to the river after an absence of many years. The pioneers of Maine's rafting industry experienced the river in ways that are incomprehensible to most guides today. Recently, I asked Alan to share some of what he remembers about the early days of the Whitewater Rafting Industry in Maine.
"How did you get started in the rafting industry?"
"I was working at Wilson camps guiding fishing sports. Wayne and Susie Hockmeyer had just come up from New York after selling their waterbed business. Wayne wanted to start a rafting business. Nobody really knew anything about rafting. You have to remember this was 1976. At that time Sonny Wade was guiding bear hunters up in the Greenville area. If you know anything about bear hunting you know it doesn't begin until three or four in the afternoon. Sonny needed something for his bear hunters to do during the day, and Wayne started taking them down the river. Sonny was quite concerned about the safety of this activity but volunteered his hunters to man our boats anyway.
I went down three times, and on the fourth trip, I was the guide. Since nobody really had any idea about what we were supposed to do, everyone had a great time. Those first trips started at the East Outlet of Moosehead Lake. The first four times we went down the river, the trips started at 6:30 in the morning, and we had no paying customers; they were all volunteers. It was a long day. We did the trip that way for three years. Often we were running on 1,000 CFS because Central Maine Power Company really didn't want anything to do with this rafting business. The Kennebec River looks a lot different at 1,000 CFS than it does at 5,000 or 6,000 CFS. We motored across Indian Pond and stopped at Harris Station Dam for lunch, then portaged the dam and did the lower half. Some of the river drivers were still using bateaus to drive logs down the river that first year I guided.
Later, my job was to drive around the places in Greenville where people stayed and sell trips. We wanted $29 back then and it was hard to get. We went up to $39, as we realized we weren't making any money. Most people don't know that Wayne [Hockmeyer] was an astute businessman. He knew there was money to be made if it was done right. There were few companies, but the competition was fierce. There was a lot of animosity, mostly caused by us. We [Northern Outdoors] had a certain swagger. Wayne was also responsible for getting Central Maine Power to agree to guarantee water every day. He got the other companies to join with him to put pressure on CMP to give us a regular release. It was a simple business decision on their part, and their shareholders couldn't turn down about $60,000 a year of free money."
"What rapid did you find most challenging?"
"Aw, hands down it was Three Sisters. I watched a 20-foot, Sweep-oared pontoon boat do an endo in the Second Sister. You couldn't think about going to a smaller boat because you were attacking the Three Sisters every day. Boats flipped on a regular basis. Another company decided to try dories, and ran those for two or three years. They had a lot of interesting experiences trying to keep those boats straight. We'd make fun of them because they had to run away from the waves. I remember that the first fatality [in 1977] was at the Three Sisters involving those dories. A dory swamped in one of the Sisters and a customer fell out of the boat. The guide inadvertently pulled one of those old Mae West lifejackets up over the head of the customer while trying to get the person back in the boat. Without a lifejacket, she didn't have much of a chance. There was no legislation back then, so there was no investigation. We were always a bit intimidated by those three huge waves. But everyone in those days wanted to be a "Crack waterman". That means being known as a wild guy out there on the river, somebody that would take that boat no matter what, and didn't fear anything short of God, and run water no matter what the level. It was like the Wild West where everybody was learning how to run the river. I went out of the boat the second or third time I went down, but I don't remember much about it [the swim]. I do remember the feeling of just not knowing if it could be done or how often it could be done. It was all just a bunch of question marks at the time. Could we do this two or three times a day without killing ourselves or somebody else?"
"What kind of equipment was used in the beginning that you wouldn't find today?"
"We started using sweep oars on those 20-foot British Leyland boats because we couldn't control the boats. The first two trips [before the sweep oars] we'd be going around in circles. Those boats weighed about 300 or 400 pounds. The boat would be out of control, but that was because mostly, we just didn't know how to run a boat. We used the motor mounts to put a 10-foot wooden oar in the back. It was very effective. The people would paddle; the guide would call the commands just like they do today. The problem was that they were dangerous as hell. When you feathered the oar, the current would push down on the oar with tremendous force. Everybody that used them ended up with dislocated fingers or broken jaws. When we got rid of the 20-foot pontoon boats, we stopped using the sweep oars, too, because they were too big for the [smaller] boats."
The conclusion of the interview with Alan Haley will be in the next issue. He'll describe early guide training, changes in the industry, and share his advice for new guides.
Just a reminder, if you'd like to look at my portal you can go to http://www.portaportal.com/ then type "guidelines" in the guest dialog box. I have collected many interesting sites for raft guides and folks who love running rivers.
Until next time, "never give up…"
Scott Phair is an educational administrator in Augusta and lives in Manchester, Maine.
Email nick [at] noumbrella [dot] com with your questions, comments and concerns.
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