Sope Creek

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Forum: BoaterTalk

Re: Suburban Sope Creek Carnage - 2 need to confess their swims! by paddleman m Jun 19 2003, 0:52 GMT New

Re: Solved (long) by Will_Gosney Jun 19 2003, 4:51 GMT New

Re: Did anyone have a throw rope? by Bradley Jun 19 2003, 5:29 GMT New

Date: Jun 19 2003, 6:04 GMT

From: Will_Gosney

From: 'Michael R. Stephenson'

Well, we learned a lesson or two today. Only one of us had run this run before. Neither Chad or myself had even seen it other than the descriptions on the AW page. We should have at least driven over Paper Mill and looked at it on our way to the put-in.

On the one hand, we would have seen that the line was on river right at the first two big holes/drops, then back left above the bridge, then push hard left-to-right going under the bridge and run the rest of the rapids on the right. Milt mentioned something to this effect, but I didn't remember it until afterward, so I had no idea what was coming up really, was just following the leader so to speak. That's a bad place to be, and I usually try not to let myself get in that position.

On the other hand, looking at the run on the way to meet up might not have helped all that much; it probably would not have helped with the decision to run the river (plus, I showed up in my BigEZ rather than the creek boat). We were unfortunate that as we were waiting to meet up and running shuttle, it rained pretty hard for about half an hour and then rained more moderately for another half hour before it stopped. Looking at the USGS gauge, Sope Creek jumped from 5.98ft/587cfs at 5:30, when we were just meeting up, to 9.04ft/1510cfs by 6:30, about the time that we put on. I knew the creek was flashy, but I didn't have any idea how much.

After paddling on a bunch of fast-moving flat water (that's a kind of scary contradiction) with a lot of debris in it, and looking at the bank and realizing that the river was probably cresting or at or about at it's highest level, maybe we should have gotten out. But, everyone was loose and chatting as we made our way toward the rapids. Frankly, the levity was because we didn't have a clue what we were headed toward.

When we got to the first set of rapids, everyone was doing fine. These amounted to some almost river-wide holes but not too terrible, and some huge offset waves breaking all over the place, stuff that I'd basically call 'big water.' After we went through the initial stage, Geoff and Louie eddied out on river left. Jeff said that the first big ledge hole was below. So we were all strewn out in somewhat of an eddy when Chad came paddling down. His boat was pretty full of water from going through the section up above, and he wasn't able to make it quite into the eddy. There was an 'oh shit', then he headed down towards the big ledge, pointed backwards from missing the eddy. He seemed to mostly turn around and just barely straighten his boat downstream before he went over the horizon line angled slightly left.

I was sitting there and didn't know what to do. I knew there was a bad hole there, I didn't think I was in a position to do much in the boat I had brought to the party, so I just kind of sat there and mulled things over for what seemed like an eternity. All that time, Chad was getting recirculated in the hole. Before too long Louie peeled out and headed toward the drop. I peeled out when I saw him, though I was quite a big farther upstream then he was.

When I approached the drop, searching, hoping, praying for a sign of two people paddling out of the hole, or at least a tongue or some other way around, thinking that my best bet at least was as far left as I could get, I looked down and saw both Chad and Louie swimming in the hole. Shit. I figured I was going to be hole bait too. Just above the drop I then noticed an eddy on river left with some large rocks/boulders. I jumped in the eddy and got out of my boat as quickly as I could. By this time, Louie had washed out of the hole, but I could see Chad, who had been in the hole much longer, swimming, back-stroking, a good ways down from the crease, maybe 15ft, but even though he was swimming (he looked exhausted), he was slowly but surely moving upstream towards the hole. That was freaky. I was hoping to get up over the rocks onto the bank, grab my rope, and maybe I would be able to help Chad out. As I was making it up over the rocks, someone said 'he's out', and indeed Chad was out of the hole.

I didn't see it as I was still trying to scramble up the rocks to the bank, but apparently Louie, who had already put himself in harms way chasing after Chad, waded out as far as he could in the swift current, holding onto a tree limb, to try and reach out to Chad as he was washing downstream towards what seemed like one river-wide, nasty hole after another. Apparently Louie missed Chad's outstretched hand by only about a foot or so, but fortunately Chad was able to grab onto the 'last twig' to use his words of a tree before being swept downstream and over the next ledge and beyond. It was a very dramatic moment, and honestly Chad was in some mighty dire straits there before he got out and grabbed that last twig.

Chad's boat stayed solidly in the hole. Part of this was because it turned out there was a nice log down in the hole on the far river left that was blocking exit from the hole on that side and recirculating some of the current back into the hole. This tree was not visible even from the brink of the drop, not until we climbed up on the rocks. By the way, as we scampered over the rocks we discovered a nice nest of Yellow Jackets, and they proceeded to sting us all repeatedly.

Anyway, Chad's boat stayed in the hole for another 30-40 minutes I'd say, until finally one of his floatation bags popped out and within a minute or so the boat cartwheeled it's way out of the hole. It then proceeded downstream. It had really nice runs of the rest of the holes, it wisely took the far right line and misssed the meat of most of the holes. Milt, who had driven down to the Paper Mill bridge to get some carnage video, said at this point, 'Someone had better get in a car and haul ass down to the bridge, otherwise the boats are going to end up going down the Hooch.' Well, my guess is that they probably did, we never saw any boats by the time we got down there. We're going to head back tomorrow for a low-water run to look for Chad's and Louie's boats just in case. By the way, Milt was gracious enough to offer those of us with cars a ride back to the put-in, and we accepted.

By this time the rest of us had climbed up the bank to the road, Paper Mill, and we were on the bridge watching when Chad's boat came floating by and headed on downstream.

That's about it for the telling of the story. But I do have a couple of additional thoughts. First, Louie did a very brave thing chasing after Chad. I feel like a sissy that I sat in the eddy wondering what to do and then that I didn't run the drop to try and help him, but yet I'm not sure those were entirely the wrong decisions either. I just feel that I let Chad down. Chad, by the way, was also a trooper, he never looked panicked, and as he will tell you in his description of the events I am sure, he was actually pretty darn calm and thinking of what he might try to get out of the sucker on about his 6th or 7th recirc.

We took some definite risks today, take heed of them everyone. None of us knew the run except for Geoff. The creek level was extremely high, but even worse we didn't know what the level was because the USGS was spotty today and there were no marks on the side of the gauge that Milt said he had painted there in the past. Someone joked that they were probably underwater, but Milt said no, they probably just changed out the tin culvert that he had painted the marks on. But the point is, we didn't have a clue what the level really was. We knew it was pretty high, but not how high. I personally never would have dreamed that it was over 9ft. It's not the smartest thing to get on a raging creek that only one guy knows and no one knows how high it is.

Having said that, at least no one got killed or seriously hurt, and we all got out at that point, figured we had had enough, and maybe that was the smartest thing we had done all evening.

I took a few pictures, which are at:

http://community.webshots.com/album/77549937SdpISkhttp://community.webshots.com/album/77549937SdpISk