Heading into Hole in the Wall
With very little recent rain, there wasn't much running in Washington, so it was time for a trip to Oregon. For some reason, Portland boaters prefer to run the Clackamas on Sundays, so there were very few people on Saturday. We ended up with a group of 4 catboats, and this was my first catboat run on this river, having IKed it just a little over a year earlier.
The flow was a little higher than the year before (2000cfs, as opposed to around 1700), but that made most of the rapids easier. One thing we didn't realize, and it would hurt us later, was that we had ordered ourselves wrong. I typically boat with IKers, so I row forward a lot and go kind of fast. As a result, I often caught up with the other boats, and I really should have led the group.
When we got to Hole in the Wall, this had a bad consequence. The boat I was following slowed down in the main drop and in order to avoid hitting the boat, I had to pull back. This slid me into the place I didn't want to go. Within a few seconds, I was stuck in an eddy on the wrong side of a powerful headwall. This is a well-known trap for boats, and there is even a chain ladder attached to the rocks to allow a stuck swimmer to climb out rather than drown.
The first thing that happened was that I went up onto the pillow wave which tried to flip me and pulled my left oar out of the oarlock. The oar tether held and I was able to get the oar back in place, but it had stretched the oarlock open, making it easier to come out again. For the next 10 minutes, I was bounced around as I tried several times to row myself across the current. I looked to see if help was coming, but I couldn't see very well and the other people in the group were still formulating a plan. I checked out the chain ladder and other options for climbing out, and examined the shape of the eddy. A huge log sticking down into the upper part of the eddy made it tough to get any upstream momentum, so my only good option was to try to get positioned so I could get 2 solid strokes into the current. The fourth time I tried to row out, I was able to get enough pull to go up on the pillow just past the mid-point, and the river dropped me into the main current. I was free!
Not long after this, we had lunch and then enjoyed the rest of the run without any trouble. It was an exciting day on the river.
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