Floating Adventures, Misadventures (River Hills Traveler, May 1978)

Note:  Here is another of my early illustrated articles for the River Hills Traveler.  The illustration was one of my favorites.  I've had many float trip adventures since, but I still tell the stories about these early ones.

Of all River Hills outdoor activities, floating is my favorite.  I don't think I have ever gone on a float trip I didn't enjoy.  But not all float trips turn out like those in the fancy outdoor magazines.  The weather and the fish don't always cooperate, and well-laid (or half-baked) plans don't always work out.  Perhaps by reading about some of my less-than-perfect float trips, you will glean something from my mistakes.  My first overnight float trip was enough to turn the average person against floating.  My friend Rick and I had planned it for several weeks, and had finally talked our parents into providing transportation to the river.  Several of our friends, all of them without boats, wanted to go, too.  All we had was a beat-up 12-foot johnboat, but we finally agreed to take one other guy, a big, gangly kid called Gook, if he agreed to sit in the middle of the boat, atop the gear, and get out at every riffle.

Even now, with light, compact equipment and plenty of experience to know what to leave at home, it amazes me how much gear we take on a two day trip.  Just imagine the mountains of gear and food we carried on our first one.  It took us an hour just to unload it.  Rick was supposed to bring one paddle, I was expected to supply two, and Gook would furnish an extra one.  After Dad had pulled away, we discovered just one paddle among us.  That was bad enough, but--typical 14 year old behavior--Rick tossed a nice-sized rock at me and I swung at it with our only paddle.  I was left holding the handle, staring at the two halves of the blade.

It was mid-afternoon when we arrived at the river.  By the time we loaded all the gear and found two willow poles and a 4 foot length of splintery two-by-four for locomotion, there was an hour of daylight left.  We started down the river, the johnboat wallowing with water a couple inches from the gunwales, Rick in the back with a knotty willow pole, myself in the front with the board, and Gook perched atop the huge heap of gear in the middle like some sort of buzzard on a mountaintop.

We were floating upper Big River from Mount's Gravel to Leadwood Beach, and we had never floated that stretch.  We planned to drift downriver until we found a good gravel bar next to a deep catfish hole where we could make camp.

There weren't any good gravel bars.  We covered nearly two miles, and dark found us evaluating an 8 foot square, 6 inch high sandbar.  The bar was so small that, once we laid the sleeping bags out, there was no room for the other gear and we had to leave it in the boat.

We spent the first part of the night in an unsuccessful search for dry firewood in the swamp behind our "gravel bar".  We fished for catfish unsuccessfully until the swamp's mosquitoes turned us into masses of itchy lumps; they even bit Gook on top of his other gift from the swamp--poison ivy.  Driven finally into our sleeping bags, we found them soaked from water seeping up through our too-low sandbar.  In spite of all this, I went to sleep about 3 AM, only to be awakened immediately by a crazy mountain man throwing boulders at us.  It was actually a beaver, slapping his tail on the surface, and that scroungy creature must have taken a perverse delight in our plight, for he continued his antics until dawn.

Wet, cold, and miserable, we got an early start that morning, but the warm sun soon dried us out, and the river seemed to be trying to make up for all the abuse we had taken, for the fish were very cooperative.  But it kept getting hotter.  A fine May morning turned into a dog day afternoon.  At 2 PM we came to a recognizable place which I thought (wrongly) was about halfway through the float, and since our parents were to pick us up at 5:00, we were afraid we were running late.  Our hands too blistered and  splinter-infested for further frantic paddling and poling, we waded and swam and pushed and dragged the boat, splashing desperately down the river, and came to our take-out in 15 minutes.

The scanty shade of the gravel bar at Leadwood Beach was all occupied by people who gave us odd stares as we pulled our boat onto the bar, tossed away our makeshift paddles, and tried to relieve our exhaustion by sleeping on the hot gravel.  We baked, and dozed, and prayed for our parents to come early.  They were late.

That same stretch of river was the scene of another near disaster years later.  My companion on the trip, Dwain Qualls, had a new 4WD International Scout he was quite proud of.  It had been stolen off the lot where he worked just the week before, but had been recovered intact.  Leaving my vehicle at the low water bridge at Leadwood, we put in at Mount's.  Qualls left his Scout, securely locked, on the gravel bar and we started downriver. 

A nice day quickly turned nasty, with a deluge lasting more than an hour.  We waited it out, minus raingear, on a slippery mud bank beneath some willow trees that provided no shelter at all.  When we finally continued downstream, we found the fish had never read the books which say they are supposed to be active after summer showers.

All the little creeks we passed were pouring torrents of muddy water into the river, but there was still plenty of clear water for fishing, and we didn't notice at first that the river was rising.  However, soon we were floating over weed beds that are usually out of the water, and the river quickly changed to brown.  Fishing was forgotten as we concentrated on navigating a river growing more powerful and dangerous all the time.  Water was surging over the low water bridge when we made a precarious landing just above it.  We were thinking of Dwain's Scout on the low gravel bar back at Mount's, and we loaded quickly and rushed back.

When we came to the high ground overlooking the gravel bar, it was out of sight under swirling, muddy water, and the Scout was gone!  Dwain was stricken, moaning about losing his pride and joy (again!)  Then, to our amazement, we spotted his car on the high ground behind us, still locked.  We never found out who moved it, or how, but whoever it was, they had Dwain's heartfelt thanks!

Sometimes your best-laid plans just don't quite work out.  My frequent partner, T. G. Harris, and I had planned a trip on the Bourbeuse River for more than a year, having heard it was an excellent stream for big smallmouth.  I had made several scouting trips to the area, checking water levels and access points, and we had decided that the 20 mile trip from Noser Mill to Reiker Ford would be a perfect two-day excursion.

I suppose the car trouble we had on the 90 mile trip to the river was a sign of things to come, but we didn't let it stop us.  When we arrived at Noser Mill we were greeted with a shock.  Instead of the strong volume of murky water I had encountered on every previous visit, there was a bare trickle of too clear water seeping through the cracks in the old mill dam.  But we had driven that far and we weren't about to go back home.  Hoping for a swell in volume from tributary creeks, we started scraping down the river.

The Bourbeuse has plenty of long pools, almost stagnant in the low water.  Fishing was poor except for a two pound walleye which hit my spinnerbait on the surface in a shallow pool where walleye just don't belong.

By mid-afternoon we had covered barely five miles, and we had to stop fishing and cover some river.  We soon passed the mouth of Spring Creek, which freshened and swelled the river with a strong flow of cold, clear water.  The next few miles were the best water we had come to, but were forced to paddle through them.

We covered about half the float by late afternoon and began looking for a campsite.  We were still looking at dark, having passed two more miles of river devoid of good gravel bars.  We finally conceded defeat and decided to paddle until we reached the take-out.  Unfortunately we had only brought one small flashlight, and it was a moonless night.  We sloshed down long pools and blundered through riffles.

At 3 a.m. I checked my inadequate maps and guessed we were getting fairly close to the takeout at Reiker Ford, a simple road cut beside a shallow riffle which I had never seen from river level.  At the bottom of a shallow riffle I folded the maps and told T. G. it should be about one more mile to the takeout.  Then I just happened to shine the dying flashlight back upstream, and there was the road-cut.  We came that close to continuing on to the next takeout seven miles downstream!

The ultimate in bad float trips had to be the experience of two young men I encountered while wading the St. Francis River below H Highway south of Farmington during a period of very low water.  This stretch of river has shut-ins at least as rough as those in the Millstream Gardens and Silvermines area farther downstream, but the first couple of miles below the bridge is tame water, long pools and couple of gravelly riffles.  I was near the head of the last pool above the beginning of the shut-ins when the two guys passed me in an empty canoe.  It was already mid-afternoon, and the next real access was 72 Highway, ten miles downstream, so I wondered where they were going in an empty canoe. 

A half hour later, a 14 foot jonboat with three young men and a mountain of gear reached me.  They were lazily paddling and diligently consuming beer. 

"Hey, man, did two guys in a canoe go past ya?" one of them asked between sips.

"Yeah, they did.  They with you?"

"Yep, we're carrying the camp gear.  They are gonna float down a few more miles and wait for us to get there and make camp."

"You headed for 72 Highway tomorrow?" I asked.  They told me they were, and drifted on downstream.  I heard their boat banging against the rocks of the shut-ins around the bend shortly afterward.

An hour later, I reached the shut-ins.  They were resting, having wrestled that heavy boat a whole 30 feet through the rocks thus far.  It was obvious they would never get through in that low water.

"Hey, man, how much more of this is there on down?"

I'm afraid I snickered superiorly, "the rest of the float is all about like this."  That produced a series of groans and curses.  One of them wondered what they should do.

I suggested, "if I were you, I'd turn around and go back.  You'll never make it through with that boat."

They agreed, and began to shout for the two guys in the canoe, who were probably miles downriver by that time.  We soon saw that a storm was brewing, and I climbed the bank to hike back to my car.  They watched me, and hollered some more, and finally one of them said, "to heck with them, let's start back."

The last I saw of them they were paddling back up the river.  The storm struck with rain, hail, and lightning, as I reached my car.  Somewhere down the river two young me huddled without gear as the gloom of a stormy night descended.  I've often wondered how they made out.

Buried Past the Barb

Many years ago, when I was a very young adult, I belonged to a local bass fishing club.  This was in the early days of bass fishing tournaments, and almost none of us in the club had the early "bass boats", which were ridiculous-looking compared to what is common today, both in looks and in performance.  We used canoes and aluminum johnboats, and we had tournaments once a month, mostly on small, local lakes.  We were having a tournament on Sunnen Lake, west of Potosi, Missouri, one day.  There were probably about a dozen boats from our group scattered across the lake.  I was fishing that day by myself; I was in my little 12-foot johnboat with an electric trolling motor and a very small outboard motor.  I was using a big deep-diving lure with two large treble hooks, casting it toward the bank, when I miscalculated and landed the lure in a bush overhanging the water.  I jiggled and jerked to no avail, so I turned my head to reach for the switch to the trolling motor to turn it on and go over to the bank, and as I did, I gave the lure one more hard tug.  It came loose, flying through the air back toward me, and I turned my head back to see where it was going, just in time to catch it in my face.  It was stuck right in the very sensitive skin where my upper lip meets my nose.  I reached up, felt the hook, and realized it was buried well past the barb.  It wasn't coming out.  I looked around, and saw that there was nobody else in our group anywhere near me, but I could see a couple of boats on the other side of the lake.  I clambered to the back of the boat to start the outboard motor to go over and get some help.  When I tugged on the starter rope, that's when I realized all the slack line from my reel to my lure had wrapped around my arm and shoulder, and the hard pull to start the motor jerked the lure attached to me VERY painfully.  But the motor started on the first pull, and I headed across the lake.

Eventually, I had three or four of my friends and competitors gathered around me on the bank, discussing what to do.  Going to the emergency room was discussed, but one friend who was the city marshal decided he could get it out.  He bore down, pushing the barb of the hook on through, the curve of the hook making it come back out of the skin.  Then he clipped off the now exposed barb and point with a set of side cutters, and removed the hook.  You can imagine how much that hurt!  If you've ever tried to do something like that, you've probably been surprised at how much force it takes to push even a very sharp hook through human skin.  If you've ever tried to use simple force to just pull the hook barb back out of the hole it went in, you'll know that unless the hook is very small, that takes even more force, and results in a LOT of pain, and probably won't work at all.

Perhaps coincidentally, just a few weeks or months afterwards, I came upon an article in one of the big three outdoor magazines about how to more easily remove hooks.  I still remember the photos accompanying the article, which used a raw chicken from the grocery store to show the technique.  I read it and it made some sense, and I kept it in the back of my mind.

Fast forward about a decade.  My wife Mary and I hadn't been married long...or perhaps this was even before we got married.  We were fishing, and Mary ended up with the treble hook from a Rattletrap lure stuck past the barb in her forearm.  Again, the emergency room was discussed, but I remembered that article from long ago.  I told her I knew an easy trick for removing the hook.  She reluctantly agreed that I should try.  As I was getting the materials ready for the big operation, she asked me, "You have done this before, haven't you?"

I knew a truthful answer would result in quitting fishing and driving the hour or so to the ER, so yes, I lied.  "Sure!  I've done it many times."

I have to tell you that I was sweating bullets.  If this didn't work our relationship would certainly suffer, as would Mary.  But I got the hook into position, pushed down on the barb, and yanked, very hard, on the loop of line.  The hook went flying into the brush, never to be seen again, and Mary was impressed; she had hardly felt it.

I and many others call this the string trick.  I have since removed hooks from myself and others many times, and it has never failed, always surprising me and whoever has suffered the buried barb with how quick and painless it is.  If you are an angler, you really, really need to know this trick.

First of all, you should be prepared.  I always carry either a set of side cutters or a small multi-tool in my pocket or my tackle when I go fishing. I also have a length of old fly fishing line, about three feet long, in my tackle.  That is basically all you'll need.  And you don't even need the fly line, any sturdy line or string will do.  I've used doubled over monofilament fishing line at times, and my shoelace at other times.

In the case of lures with treble hooks attached, the first order of business is to remove the lure from the buried hook, and that's where the side cutters come in. On most such lures these days, the hooks are attached to the lure body with split rings, and you just clip the split ring with the side cutters.  I've gotten it done even with the tiny little wire cutting section of the pliers of my little multi-tool.  That will probably be the most painful part of the operation, because you have to move the lure around, twisting the hook a bit, in order to get it off.  Once you've gotten that far, you're home free.

The diagram below shows how to do it.  You loop your length of line around whatever part of the bend of the hook is still exposed.  Then, you push HARD on the eye of the hook, pushing it directly toward the buried barb.  THIS PART IS IMPORTANT!  You MUST push HARD on the eye, and push it directly toward where you imagine the barb of the hook is.  Then, while pushing, you simply jerk the line in the direction shown, trying to jerk it parallel to the hook shank.  Jerk sharply and hard.  The hook should pop right out.  I've always thought that both the operator and the victim should be wearing eye protection when you do this, or at least close your eyes, because that hook will go flying to who knows where.

I show to cut the other barbs off the hook, and that's a good idea if you have a set of wire cutters that is strong enough to do so, but it isn't necessary.  As for the pushing firmly on the eye of the hook, I once watched a Youtube video where this guy stuck two big hooks in his own forearm to test the efficacy of removing a hook using the string trick compared to the technique of pushing the barb on through and out and clipping it off.  He pushed the barb on through first, and just about collapsed from the pain and difficulty of doing so.  Then he had a helper to push on the eye of the hook while he used the string trick.  BUT...he did not tell the helper to push firmly, he just told him to hold the eye of the hook down.  So when he jerked on the string, the eye of the hook came out from under the helper's fingertip, and instead of the hook popping out, it just twisted, and ended up pushing the barb on through just like the first time.  And he almost collapsed from the pain!  The main reason to push HARD on the eye of the hook is to stretch the skin and open a channel for the barb to travel through when you jerk, but it also serves to keep THAT from happening.

One note...the string trick won't work on those "outbarb" hooks with the barb on the outside of the bend.  I don't care whether those things hook fish better or not, I will NOT use them, because I don't want to have to deal with trying to get one those types of hooks out of myself or my buddy.

I've had to remove hooks from my own big toe, calf, thigh, belly, forearm, and several fingers.  Removing them from your own arm or hand is problematical, since you need a hand to push on the eye of the hook and another hand to tug on the string.  I have solved that problem by finding a log or rock that has a protuberance that I can place the eye of the hook against and push down on it, while tugging the string with the other hand.  No matter how you do it, you must apply that force pushing the eye toward the buried barb.  

It is always surprising to me when people tell tales of going to the emergency room to get hooks removed, and the doctors numbing the area and either cutting the hook out or pushing the barb on through.  I have yet to hear a story where the doctor used the string trick.  In fact, one of my fly fishing buddy's brother is a doctor, and when we were discussing the string trick one day on the river, he said he didn't believe it worked and wouldn't try it on a patient, even after I told him some of my hook removal stories.  One of my best stories was when I was at a gathering of people on a small lake, and one of the other guys was fishing the lake and got the hook from a Zara Spook in his forearm.  He came back to the campground saying he had to go to the emergency room to get it removed.  

"Nah," I said, "I can get it out.  And it won't hurt, either."

Now he didn't know me all that well, and he was dubious, but finally he agreed.  So he sat down at a picnic table while I got my stuff out.  I quickly clipped off the hook, but as I was doing so, he was staring at that big hook in his arm and I could tell he was getting woozy.  I told him to look away.  Then his head came down on the table; I think he had passed out.  By that time I had the line looped around the bend, so I simply gave it a jerk and out the hook came.  A second or so later he raised his head, and said, "No, I'm sorry, I gotta go to the ER."  

I just told him, "Take a look at your arm."

The string trick won't work in some situations.  You don't want to try it if the hook is in or near an eye, or stuck into cartilage or a joint.  You have to evaluate it to see if it is possible to push in the required direction.  But I have yet to encounter such a situation.  The only time I was unable to use the string trick was when I was floating and fishing by myself and got a hook stuck in the back of my upper arm.  I couldn't reach it well enough to get it off the lure, let alone figure out how to maneuver to be able to push the eye of the hook against something.  Fortunately, I was only a half mile from where my truck was.  It was still a two-hour drive home with the lure stuck in my arm, but I made it, and my wife quickly popped the hook out.