How to Prepare for a Rafting Trip

1. One week before the trip, have a yard of sand delivered to your home. Sprinkle liberally in your bed, dresser drawers, on kitchen and bathroom counters. Fill your salt shaker, sugar bowl and cereal boxes with sand and use them as usual. Place garbage can lids of sand in front of your fans and run them continuously at maximum speed.
2. After renting a projection TV, illuminate the walls and ceiling of your bedroom with old Dracula movies, especially the snake, spider, lizard and bat infested scenes.
3. Have your friends form a long line. Then, systematically pass the entire contents of your home out of the front and into the back door of your house.
4. With an industrial size brush and bottle of bleach, wash, rinse and sterilize the hubcaps of your car thirty minutes after sunrise and immediately after sunset every day for eight days.
5. With a large meat tenderizer, practice beating beer cans down to the diameter of a hockey puck.
6. Sit on the hood of your car while riding through the car wash.
7. Line your sandals with sandpaper and spend two hours per day on a stair master.
8. Drape the allotted contents of your brown grocery bag on the bushes and rocks in your back yard. Twice a day practice changing while your neighbors watch.
9. With twenty-seven friends standing in the shallow end of a swimming pool, practice looking nonchalant as you carry on a conversation and pee simultaneously.
10. Crap in your upstairs waste paper basket, then, with your pants still around your ankles, run downstairs and pee in the tub.
11. Keep putting out cans of kippers and oil soaked sardines until someone finally eats them. This will usually take around six to seven days.
12. Hand out free beer to anyone that can Eskimo Roll a kayak and looks as if they will rob your house during your eight day rafting trip.
13. Put liberal quantities of "Gun Slinger" hot sauce on everything you eat. Practice saying "I love this stuff" without your eyes tearing and your nose running.
14. Always answer "yes" to the question "Do you see any rocks!"
15. Always answer "no" to the question "Does anyone want to go on a power hike!"

Sent in by Tim Whitney, who got it from Roxanne Denoyer at Grand Canyon Expeditions, whose passengers created it.

I just got back from two weeks in the Grand Canyon. My father and I did the eight day motorized rafting trip first then spent two days exploring Bryce Canyon and Zion Canyon. It was an incredible adventure. And although I have some great photos and a few videos none of that really captures the essence of the trip and the awe one feels in the depth of the canyon. So if you have the chance I highly recommend the full canyon rafting trip. The next few posts will be reports from the trip. I'm also working on a photo album.

-Susanita

This post is long overdue. I've been busy with landscaping and outrigger paddling, neither of which are blog worthy, although I'd like to brag about the landscaping. Maybe another post ... when it's finished. We did have a little adventure a few weeks ago. I wasn't going to post about it for fear of embarrassing my friends, but they tell me it's ok. We had a little rescue on the Bay. Nothing major just an overturned kayak, a little hypothermia, and all the rescue teams storming the beach to get to the injured party. Now that it's over we can laugh about it. But at the time it was kind of scary.



It was your typical kayak accident. It was a perfect day. Calm winds, no clouds, highs in the 70's. Then the weather changed rapidly. The wind picked up and started tossing the kayaks around like toys in a tub.

Ok. That's a little melodramatic. Here's what happened. Pam, Ursula, Ruth and I were spending the weekend at my friend, Muffy's, beach house. Pam brought her kayak but for whatever reason I didn't bring mine. Muffy had three kayaks at the beach house. So we had four kayaks and five women. I decided to hang out on the beach while the four of them went for a short paddle. Ursula and Ruth don't kayak much so I thought this would be a great way to introduce them to the sport. It almost worked.



They launched in clear skies and calm seas. I took photos of the launch then headed down the beach to photograph the sea grass. They paddled down a few miles then decided to take a break on the beach. This is the beginning of the spawning season for the horseshoe crabs so the water close to shore was swarming with them. They took lots of photos of the crabs. Then walked around the beach having fun. A half hour passed. It was time to get back so they launched back into the Bay.



But the wind was picking up every so slightly. Then it picked up more. By the time they were all launched the wind was gusting over 25 mph (estimated). The sea was forming whitecaps and huge swells started to overcome the kayaks. Pam got hit by a beam wave ... and went over. She popped the spray skirt and swam right up. But the kayak was out of control. The hatches had failed and now they were filled with water. Vainly she tried to flip the kayak back up.

Around this time Muffy came to her rescue. Recognizing that the kayak was lost she told Pam to grab onto the back of her kayak and release her kayak to the sea gods. Reluctantly Pam took the tow. But the water was 55 degrees and she was cold. The waves were breaking over her head pushing her pfd up around her head. Muffy said she was afraid Pam would let go so she yelled back to her to keep talking so she would know she was still there. It was a 1/4 mile to shore.

When they got to shore Pam was shaking all over. She was hypothermic. Fortunately Ruth and Ursula sprang into action and gave Pam their warmer clothes. Then they moved her away from the beach and the blowing wind and buried her in the sand.



Meanwhile ... Muffy ran a 1/2 mile to the road to summon help. The fire department and the department of Natural Resources converged upon the beach.



Rescue over. Muffy managed to talk one of the rescue guys into carting the kayaks back to the beach house. Then they called me. While all this was going on I was pacing the floor of the beach house. I had waited patiently for their return. We had a big dinner planned. When the wind picked up and I saw the whitecaps forming on the Bay I knew they were in trouble. They had also left without their cell phones. It was tough call. Waiting and feeling the impending doom, I broke down and called the coast guard. They had just launch a rescue helicopter when the DNR called the beach house to report that they were rescued.



End of drama. After everyone had returned to the beach house, Ursula fixed us the gourmet seafood bisque she had promised us. We toasted to a glass of wine and made a note to remember the day and be thankful it ended so peacefully.



The next day Muffy decided to stay curled up in the beach house with a good book while the rest of us walked the beach. The horseshoe crabs were still crawling around on the beach by day break.



Some of them were stuck in the sand. We decided to give a few of them a break and carry them back to the sea. After all someone gave us a break the day before.



We walked up the beach till we came to Murderkill River which separate North Bower's Beach from South Bower's Beach. As we were walking up the road we saw an interesting little fish market and decided to stop in. As it turns out the man behind the counter was the mayor. It was a small town. And Pam got to tell the story of her rescue again. More photos HERE.



~Susanita