EPIC FAIL - Attempt at Final Leg of ATL50

Wow... what a beautiful day today in North Georgia!  Tony and I had to punt last Saturday due to thunderstorms and I can't tell you how excited both of us were to get started on our final leg of the ATL50 - Canoeing thru the Chattahoochee River NRA journey.  We knew this was going to be the day, but we also knew that with the three biggest shoals sections on the river ahead of us, it was going to be the toughest day yet, but wait... I'm getting ahead of myself...

We met up where we left off at the end of ATL50 - Leg 7; Lower Morgan Falls to Powers Island.  Gretchen was gracious enough to agree to drop us off and pick us up.

I love this launch point, but I felt an omen falling over us when this nice family was asking a bunch of questions about our journey.  I responded with such confidence and bravado telling them that we were doing our final leg of a 50 mile trip.  For me at least, that kind of non-disclaimer based presentation is usually followed with some kind of karmic kick-back.  Right away we knew it was going to be tough, but fun.  Under the 285 bridge the current was wild and the canoe quickly turned 90 degrees on us.  Tony reported a quick, "what did you do!?" that I replied with "the river takes us where she wants us to go".

We did pretty well through our first few sections of rocks/shoals and we had very high spirits.  We knew we were surely going to get wet today and it didn't take terribly long to flip the canoe and get our first good dip into the river for the day.  No worries, it wasn't deep and we were able to dump all the water on a nearby rock and get started again.  That's when things quickly went from fun to failure...

I can still see it now, we slipped through a break in the rocks just wide enough for the canoe and then had to make a tight left turn to go for another break around the protruding rock in front of us.  That's when it all happened.  We caught the rock on the starboard mid-section on the canoe.  It rode up on the rocks just enough for water to come in on the port side.  Then as we were tipping (hey, I still thought we were easily going to recover from this) I started to stand with my left leg and the current caught me a bit.  I was pushed back on the stadium chair setup we had (see last picture in ATL50 - Leg 3; Settles Bridge to Abbotts Bridge) which held me in place until I finally wiggled myself out.  I looked over my shoulder to see the chair going downstream.

Yep, we fell prey to the classic canoeing blunder of getting the middle caught around some rocks.  I call it the "canoe taco".  With our gear all securely tied down to the middle seat in waterproof bags and boxes we didn't have to worry about loosing anything else except for the paddles.  Tony and I started working on unjamming the canoe with intentions of clearing the water afterwards and resuming our trip.  So... things didn't go that well...

I won't bore you with all the things we tried, but we spend about an hour exploring all kinds of different strategies.  Unfortunately the water current had the boat pinned down hard – REAL HARD!  After about 10 minutes I pretty much figured we had lost her, but I surely wasn't about to walk away from this investment without giving it the old college try (and then try it again).  Many thanks to Tony who I'm sure knew it was toast even sooner than I, but stayed with me the whole time in the freezing water.  He tirelessly tried all of my feeble plans to free the ride that has taken us so far; the iScanoe (see ATL50 - Leg 4; Abbotts Bridge to Medlock Bridge for the source of that goofy name).  He even came up with a ton of good ideas to try and didn't even give me grief when I started to get snappy towards the end.  Thanks, Tony!!  I appreciate you trying so hard to free her.

So, there she lies...

There are far uglier places to end your usefulness.

Check out my Kayaking & Canoeing Google Map of the journey to see exactly where this is on the river.  At least the area has a manly name; Devils Race Course Shoals.  I guess I should have taken that as another omen.  

So, Tony and I hiked out through the trails we were lucky enough to end our outing near and Gretchen, being gracious as ever, was so kind to wind down to a remote parking lot on the CR NRA that I would have been OK never visiting in order to extract us from today's "fun in the sun".

Before we hiked out, we waited around to see if it would break in half, but it never happened for us.  Being the eternal optimist, my sincere hope is that the iScanoe frees itself in the next 24 hours due to the daily swing in river height and that someone downstream is able to recover her.  Who knows, maybe my loss will introduce someone else to the joy of canoeing.  Truth is, I'm doubtful she can even bend back into shape, but one can hope!  

RIP my iScanoe!  You've taken us far on the ATL50 - Canoeing thru the Chattahoochee River NRA journey and we'll soldier on and find a way to finish without you, but we'll never forget the great memories we were able to burn into our mind because of you.