I’m sitting in the urgent care facility in Redmond taking care of the consequences of the most bonehead move of my kayaking career. But I get ahead of myself.

We ran the Grays River yesterday. Our crew consisted of separate contingents from Seattle and Portland. I rode down with Horner, Fish and Colorado Nick. The Oregon Rafting Team came up from Portland along with 5 other hardshells. Levels were medium low, about 700 on the Naselle gauge.

The Grays River is awesome. It’s a beautiful canyon on the southern Olympic Peninsula. The rapids are mainly ledge drops with a couple boulder gardens thrown in for variety – mainly pool drop. I won’t give you a blow-by-blow description of the rapids other than to say the guidebooks are no longer accurate about the rating. I’m calling this an easy V, not IV+. This is really one of those rivers that splits the difference between IV+ and V, and I suppose we could argue about it over beers. At medium flows solid class IV boaters will be fine, but this river will be huge at higher flows. Any hike out would be an epic undertaking. Also, there are a couple must-run rapids which were well outside my comfort zone I’m solid class IV, so draw your own conclusions.

As to my accident, the last major rapid (see Rackley’s site or the Holy Book for the name) is a very steep boulder garden funneling into a canyon. It’s one of those drops which falls away to fast to boat scout. Here’s a short synopsis of my road to the urgent care facility.

·         I’m paddling a new boat with slightly different performance characteristics than my CFS. It’s a bit faster, so in crux moves I tended to overshoot my target.

·         I didn’t scout the rapid. Hey, Fish was running it blind, what could go wrong?

·         I broach on a rock and flip, then freak out and pull my skirt as my head bounces along the bottom.

So far so good. I am, bar none, one of the best swimmers on the river. Practice makes perfect, right? I quickly get to shore and b

Thanks, James,