Rochester Creek and Moodna Creek, March 15, 2011 page 3 of 4

Towards the end of the run I managed to broach on the pair of logs at the left center of the picture. They look pretty innoccuous and out of the way, don't they?

These pictures are from a few days later, and the water is about a foot lower than it was at the time.

I went through this feature (it's not really a hole) because it's more interesting than the calmer water to the right. The tongue that goes left of the small rock shifted me about 4 feet left, and probably turned me a bit, too. The last video on page 4 shows the current flowing out the left side.

I broached with the front of my cockpit right about where the high spot on the top log is. Fortunately my instincts were good, and I leaned aggressively toward the log, getting my edge up out of the current. My boat was bouncing a bit, but I was actually in a pretty stable position, with both arms over the top of the log.

The blue line shows about what the water level was at the time. The red lines show how I entered, and planned to exit the feature, and the line I was on after being shifted left. The part of the log that's in the foreground was barely showing. The first friend to get to me started by coming in downstream of the logs, but it was deep enough that he couldn't reach over the top log and get a good grip on me. That probably means I could have washed completely underneath with no trouble, but I'm happy enough that I didn't find out for sure.

At the time I was in the front, and one of my friends was following the same line. When he saw me get shifted left he moved right, and then stopped at this very conveniently located beach. My other two friends got there a few seconds later, and they clipped a rope to the back of my boat and pulled me back against the shore. The entire incident lasted perhaps two minutes. I think it scared my friends more than me, but it's hard to be really scared when you're busy holding onto a log and edging as if your life might depend on it.