Tellico River – 7/17/05

Dodie, Mac, Lucas and I managed to coordinate a middle Tellico run with Diann and Woody despite the absence of flow information from the gauges. A lightning storm disabled the gauges sometime after Friday morning’s reading, so I asked my dad to interpolate based on past data and Jan at Creekside to confer with Diann and Woody. She also checked the rainfall in the area. Our best guess put us between 1ft and 1.5ft, skewing more toward the higher end because Crack in the Rock had the weird wave train instead of the ledge pool. It was definitely runnable, although scrapes would be inevitable.

Day 2 in the tandem boat started off much smoother than the first day. We had fun eddy hopping our way through the run. We even caught a surfing wave or two. I remembered many of the rapids from the previous runs, but they looked a bit different at this water level. Fake Crack in the Rock and the rocky wave train provided a nice warm-up to Crack in the Rock. Dodie tried to convince me the entrance was on the left, but at this water level, middle was the only runnable crack, even though it looked unconvincing at the entrance. Dodie conferred with Woody and then ran first. Mac followed, looking skeptically at the middle route until she remembered Woody’s instructions. After running the middle crack, she ran the rest of the rapid in at least one lazy circle before arriving in the pool below. Diann and Woody followed and then we ran, scraping along the right wall of the center crack and then made a valiant attempt to avoid Woody behind the big rock on river right. I have to wonder if Woody was able to snap a picture of the smiling fuzzy daisy as it attempted to impale him on the rock?

We ran a few more drops and then took a break for lunch before continuing onward. The next big hazard was a river-wide strainer above Flip Chute. We got there and I decided that I didn’t want to run it because of the strainer. Diann decided she didn’t want to run it because her usual line on river left wasn’t available. Dodie decided she didn’t want to hurt her back by landing on it funny. Mac decided to follow our example, so the boys ran the boats through. Woody ran first, bobbling a bit to the right on the landing. Lucas ran it perfectly in both the Caption and Mac’s Max, running it slightly left into the pool below. Woody ran it perfectly in Diann’s Probe. I felt pretty cool sitting with a rope at the bottom.

A few more rapids followed and then we reached Submarine rapid. Sadly, our vehicles were visible in the distance. We watched both Diann and Woody run the drops before running it ourselves. We chose Woody’s entrance, making a sharp right above the drop followed by a sharp left to run the drop. In a kayak, I have stern squirted out of this drop unintentionally. The Caption was a little big for that. We ran the line smoothly, landing in the pool below.

After loading the boats, we said our goodbyes at the takeout. Lucas and I stopped at the Ice Cream Run’s ice cream spot with Diann and Woody on the way home, one last treat on a treat-filled weekend.