Day 5 - Whitewater
It was well after midnight before the team was able to get into tents and get some sleep at Checkpoint 21 - the whitewater put-in. Because there were many teams waiting here to start the whitewater, the checkpoint had really turned into a miniature transition area. John and Shu had found a spot to set up the big tent and the entire team ate and collapsed into the tent. I woke the next morning at 4:30 AM getting a pretty decent sleep and went out to talk to Dave Adlard - who I could hear speaking to others in the TA. Dave informed me I needed to have the team up and ready to get onto rafts by 5AM so I set about waking them up. I was having little success - the comforts of a warm sleeping bag were no match for my pleading, however I had waken Shu Shu up - and she had a LOT more success rousing the team. Sure enough at 5 AM the raft guides showed up with rafts - and we had everyone in their dry suits and ready to go shortly after 5 AM.
I had neglected to tell the team that the rafting would start with a demonstration of their whitewater swimming ability in the 38 degree water before we would be allowed to get onto the rafts. As we prepared to jump into the water Team NYARA showed up from upstream and our group of teams grew by one as we all cheered NYARA to deflate their pack rafts and join us. We all jumped into the water, floated to our rafts - jumped in and off we went.
First let me say I absolutely love whitewater rafting. On rafts, duckies, pack rafts, or whitewater kayaks - whitewater is my #1 adrenaline thrill. I had read up on 6 mile creek - full class 3, 4, and multiple class 5 rapids. I was stoked, but did my best to contain my excitement. Sterling took a spot on the front of the raft in front of me, Tim across to my right. Ric was on another raft, but we were all on rafts and heading down river. We had some fun chatting with our raft guide Tommy, and the safety rower, Mudflap. Turns out Tommy had guided many of the rivers I had paddled, so we had fun chatting about different locations and times of year to raft.
I noticed that Julie who was besides me on the raft was turning bluish after the first rapid, and we ended up having to drop here off. She had not zipped her drysuit thoroughly and it had filled with water - sending her into hypothermia. She was able to get a nice warm ride and dried off - but would miss the rest of the rapids, bummer.
We had a lot of fun playing the small rapids in between the big ones, and Tommy demonstrated the ability to give everyone on the boat their own "glacial facial" by maneuvering the raft just right. We went through a couple of sets of 3-5 rapids getting ready for the final run into the big one. If you are interested in the water from the rafter POV - here is a little video I pulled from Youtube;
If you want to see what it looked like for us - well all we got were these wonderful pictures;
The final series of rapids was a series of 5 Class 5 rapids (Staircase, Suck Hole, Merry Go Round, Jaws - are the ones I remember) with no real break in between. There was a bail out opportunity before the rapids - but you would not have been able to rip me off that boat. I was pumped big time. We did get to see the boat in front of us (with Ric on it) nearly flip on the first rapid - but we bounced beautifully through all 5 of them and popped out the other end (with one last class 3 waiting for us) completely pumped.
The race instructions said that the raft guides were supposed to dump us out of the boats just past the last rapid - but Tommy had not gotten the memo so we floated serenely past the dump point and CP22. By the time Mud Flap reached the dump point all he could do was to yell to Tommy that we were supposed to be dumped into the river. Of course by that time the river had destroyed our hearing :-) and all we could do was float to the take-out and TA3.
The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. We did not have bikes (opting to save $300+ and not bring them). So we could not do the next biking leg - though had I been able to rent bikes - I would have been sorely tempted. The team got into the U-haul and we headed for Cooper's landing and the start of the kayak leg
next: http://eaglinar.blogspot.com/2015/07/expedition-alaska-part-5-kenai-lake.html
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