Shallow Canoe

There is no chronological order to each story I post, nor any significant connection between all the stories other than the fact that we are all friends, and there is no order of how interesting each one will be, whichever story comes to mind. . . .

Back in 2007, at least I think it was then, we were chilling at Mike's house. It was May and it had to be near the weekend since we were not working or had college and I know it was a weekday because the banks were open. Anyway, Mike had us go to his basement to check out his fathers new wine cellar. Out of the corner of my eye I spot an old metal canoe that was sitting on a couple of saw horses. I had brought up an idea as to maybe go canoeing down the Delaware River for when it was nice out, later on they should of listened to my idea. So we had all agreed to fix up the canoe that weekend and take it out on the water. So after a progressive weekend we had the canoe all ready and set to go. With a new paint for the name, Rosebud was ready to hit the waves. Well it turned out that the next day was really wet and rainy so we decided to cancel the trip and wait for a nice day. Friday came along days later and we were set to ride down the river.

I arrived at Jarrett's house late morning to find the canoe had been dropped of by Mike's father since he had a truck to take the canoe up to his house. So we were ready to go when Jarrett told us that him and Mike decided to take a different course down a shallow creek. Their thinking was, since it rained so much the creek would swell up and become a small river of some sort. So we launched from the swimming hole. It lasted for a good 20 feet when suddenly, SLAM!, we bottomed out. Jarrett got out and fixed the canoe and we were off again, for another 10 feet then BAM! another big rock that got in our way. This happened for quite some time, well most of the trip anyway. Apparently it took us 20min just to travel a good 1/4 mile in a shallow creek. After bottoming out countless times and Jarrett jumping out of the canoe to fix it all, we were smoothly canoeing.

Upon exiting and entering the canoe many times, Jarrett lost his wallet in the water. After realizing this he literally ran up the creek, the water was about hip high but he could not find his wallet. So we canoed further along and things were going okay, then we hit a bit of a speed zone and our other friend, Will who is not good with water, started to panic a little bit but we assured him it was okay. The canoe headed down some very minor rapids and the water was deepening. We started to turn sideways down the stream and in an attempt to correct ourselves we nearly capsized our canoe. At this point Will is freaking out and Jarrett said fuck it and jumped out of the canoe and pulled back to correct the angle just to send us backwards down the drop. Mike jumped out as well and i believe his words were "What? everyone is doing it" So myself and Will went down backwards, the water was deep. I tried to stabilize the canoe but trying to do that when your friend has a death grip on you doesn't help much.

So after that ordeal, Mike and Jarrett jumped back into the canoe and we canoed a nice calm creek. The occasional bump of a rock was all to be felt. A fork came up and being the guys we were, two of us paddled to the left, the other two paddled to the right. I got frustrated and threw my paddle out of the canoe. We ran a ground at the fork and declared camp time since it had to of been 2pm and we wanted to drink. As we relaxed for a bit I went out to get the canoe paddle I threw out of the canoe and saw Jarrett's wallet sitting a few feet away. A bit of luck came our way and we rowed out once more. After another hour we decided to call it since we ran into a huge blockade of fallen tree's and shallow water with rocks that would sink even the best of boats. We landed on shore of a forest and noticed the nice hole in the canoe. So we had no idea where we landed but we decided to walk back to get Jarrett's jeep.

After a hike through the woods we reached the road and started our hitch hike back. It took us about 45min to get back to his house and the drive to where we left off Mike and Will took a good 10 miles to get to. We canoed 3 hours to travel 10 miles, we screwed up somewhere. Once we got there we found Mike trying to kill Will, this is a normal thing for Mike to be all angry and I'll tell more about that later. We dragged the canoe a good 70 yards through the woods and up a nice steep hill. The  we miscalculated one thing, how to strap the canoe onto the top of the jeep. Lucky for us we had a good amount of rope in which to tie it down. After driving back to his house and nearly loosing the canoe on the road several times we decided it was a good trip. Few days later I had a slight earache from the trip and it sucked a bit but it was cool.

The only thing we learned that day was to bring more beer next time.