26 - 4/30/2011 - Green River Cleanup

In the past, I would wait and go over to the Green River Cleanup on Saturday morning, but the nice accommodations and promise of good food lured me to Shangri La for the weekend. I took my little cataraft and added my new cargo frame to it to help pull out some pieces of the truck we had prepared a couple of weeks earlier. When we got to the beach where the truck was, the loading crew put a big load of metal on my little boat.

That is the area of a pickup truck behind the doors and the seats, and it even included the seatbelts. There are also two fenders and some random pices of metal. You can see part of an old motorboat being loaded onto another cataraft behind me. What you can't see is the pickup truck bed, which went down in a much larger cataraft.

I was boating with someone who needed to get going, so we pushed ourselves fast down the river. It was interesting to boat with my boat so back-heavy. I had some trouble in one of the big rapids, but made it through fine.

One thing that happened that was annoying was that a group of people were blocking the takeout. Now, I'm an older person, so I understand that sometimes it isn't easy for us older folks to move heavy loads, but with age should come wisdom. These people had 3 rafts blocking the entire takeout, and it would have been smart for them to work together to get the rafts unloaded and out of the way one at a time. Instead, these people unloaded all 3 of their boats first, taking out all of the frames and everything, before taking the boats. This meant that the two of us who came in had to pull in above them and we ended up having to unload our heavy loads onto a high, muddy shoreline. I hope these people noticed that they weren't working smart and will try to fix this in the future.