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.
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