Rusty Spinner
Active member
Well, if you can't laugh at yourself, just who can you laugh at? Present company excluded, of course.
Last Thursday I floated the upper WB with 2 newbies up from North Carolina in their relatively new Willie's aluminum drift boat. Think Hyde or Clacka and you have the idea, but this one is aluminum. Since neither has ever seen this river, I am going to direct our float and we'll take turns at the oars throughout the day. But we never fully discussed the launch site I had chosen......
To quote JC (flyI4), we put in on an upper West Branch "Ghetto launch" which has, shall we say, something much more than normal boat launch gradient:crap:
We back the NC plated truck and trailer farther than I had wanted, but when the owner/driver hopped out, I figured he had a plan and/or had faced a launch steeper than the summit on Mt. Everest. So he says to me and his buddy, "let's push her a little bit out on the trailer". I assume he's planning to 1) leave the clicker on for the hand-winch and 2) that he only plans to push it maybe 3" or 4" before the line snaps taught and he jumps back in his truck and pulls it forward so we can gently slide it off the trailer. It became abundantly clear within milliseconds that I was wrong. Instead of the 3" to 4" with the woven line attached to the front cleat and not being able to come off the hand-winch, we watched in sheer horror as the boat catapulted down to the water, reaching terminal velocity somewhere halfway down. Close your eyes and imagine listening to the "WHOOO, WHOOO, WHOOO, WHOO of the crank flying around and around backward as the owner looked on in total panic. Far too late, my new friend and don't reach in there less you lose an arm!:crap: As we surveyed the situation and realized that nothing broke, we began to realize that a widely discussed plan just might have been called for prior to "The Launch" as it is now known.
As the boat hit the WBD, about half the current flow entered the back of the boat, the winch line came taught (just a little too late) and a giant wake spread across the river, putting fish down for at least 12 days. A guide anchored in a boat just above ours remarked simply as, "AWESOME!!!" We apparently had made his day as the biggest morons on the planet for that moment and I have to admit that we were, unless CMM was canoeing the Neversink Gorge. And how did we bail out the boat, you ask? Why, a red Solo Cup, of course!
Always take time to laugh at the small things in life
Last Thursday I floated the upper WB with 2 newbies up from North Carolina in their relatively new Willie's aluminum drift boat. Think Hyde or Clacka and you have the idea, but this one is aluminum. Since neither has ever seen this river, I am going to direct our float and we'll take turns at the oars throughout the day. But we never fully discussed the launch site I had chosen......
To quote JC (flyI4), we put in on an upper West Branch "Ghetto launch" which has, shall we say, something much more than normal boat launch gradient:crap:
We back the NC plated truck and trailer farther than I had wanted, but when the owner/driver hopped out, I figured he had a plan and/or had faced a launch steeper than the summit on Mt. Everest. So he says to me and his buddy, "let's push her a little bit out on the trailer". I assume he's planning to 1) leave the clicker on for the hand-winch and 2) that he only plans to push it maybe 3" or 4" before the line snaps taught and he jumps back in his truck and pulls it forward so we can gently slide it off the trailer. It became abundantly clear within milliseconds that I was wrong. Instead of the 3" to 4" with the woven line attached to the front cleat and not being able to come off the hand-winch, we watched in sheer horror as the boat catapulted down to the water, reaching terminal velocity somewhere halfway down. Close your eyes and imagine listening to the "WHOOO, WHOOO, WHOOO, WHOO of the crank flying around and around backward as the owner looked on in total panic. Far too late, my new friend and don't reach in there less you lose an arm!:crap: As we surveyed the situation and realized that nothing broke, we began to realize that a widely discussed plan just might have been called for prior to "The Launch" as it is now known.
As the boat hit the WBD, about half the current flow entered the back of the boat, the winch line came taught (just a little too late) and a giant wake spread across the river, putting fish down for at least 12 days. A guide anchored in a boat just above ours remarked simply as, "AWESOME!!!" We apparently had made his day as the biggest morons on the planet for that moment and I have to admit that we were, unless CMM was canoeing the Neversink Gorge. And how did we bail out the boat, you ask? Why, a red Solo Cup, of course!
Always take time to laugh at the small things in life
