Sore Thumb

My friend Allen Wilson up in Gold Beach, Oregon stumbled across a historic boat a couple years ago. The Betty Boop was built in the late 1960s by Keith Steele of Leaburg, Oregon for actor Ronn Hayes. Hayes spent a few years decking her out and spent the summer of 1970 rowing Grand Canyon trips with Martin Litton. By '74 Hayes had gone back to acting and sold the boat to Larry Testerman who rebuilt and rechristened her the Great Thumb. Testerman ran her for the next decade, culminating with a wicked wreck at Badger Creek on the flood of 1983. More on that later. Testerman later moved from New Mexico to Salt Lake City and the Thumb sat in a field for a quarter century until Allen spied and acquired her. He took her up to Oregon in 2009 to rebuild her, but eventually came to his senses. So he tricked me into adopting the project.

Allen also coerced me into taking a bunch of lovely Port Orford Cedar home including one 20-foot plank. Somehow the cops ignored this for 1200 miles.

The Sore Thumb soaking in a last helping of Oregon fog.

And saying goodbye to the redwood trees.

And flying up into my boat loft to spend a while commiserating with my other peculiar boats.

Bizarre paint peelings in a side hatch.

Oh, and then there's the front footwell. Something about a quarter century in the Santa Fe sun. And rain. And snow. Ooog.

Boats in funny places

An unfortunate boat in the woods in Ithaca, New York.

Ships of Burning Man

The Christina was really big.

The retired Port Orford lifeboat in Oregon--a 35-foot self-righting center-engine wild thing. The crews would launch off an inclined railway into high rocky stormy seas in the middle of the night. Madness. But no more. Now they just let them drown I guess.

And a few dolled up trawlers in Humboldt County, California--I wonder if these guys fish for Columbian submarine cargo?

Maine Event

In July I flew back east ostensibly for my 40th high school reunion, but really to go see Lora and go play with our lovechild Ruby the banks dory.  

A heron waiting for lunch to swim by.

Ruby is as lovely as ever. Maybe more so.

I took my leathering gear back to upgrade her oars.

The boating snacks go well with the wood and leather.

Ruby gets her annual oiling.

She likes it.

It makes her glow.

On Saturday we rowed into town for the big event: the lobster boat races. 

Huge boats built to troll, bellowing along at top speed.

Flat out goofy.

Not streamlined. But loud.

Fierce competitors.

In case something goes awry, they are ready.

An altered image.

And an unaltered one. Must have been something we ate. The dory is turning into an afghan hound.

Or maybe it was something we drank. Port goes well with dories.

The camera must have sipped some too.

Really, it looked like this. 

Really.

Storms and a crisis

"I pity the poor bastard," screamed Drifter one afternoon a few years back, drenched and shivering in a violent downpour, "who comes down the river and this doesn't happen to them!"

But in August, something happened that wasn't as fun. I gashed my shin, some doctors sewed it up, but a few days later it went bad. So we opened it up and purged.

And I went for a helicopter ride.

And spent a nice few days in the hospital.

But it's all better now. Thanks to all who helped.

The Old San Juan

In June I did a couple San Juan trips for Wild Rivers Expeditions with my dorky dory friends Andy Hutchinson, Kate Thompson, Curtis Patillo, and Jim Hall. Here are a couple shots of the festivities. It is such a beautiful place.

T'boatin' prayer flags

Kiting the boats offshore

The prettiest campsite of my life

Crafts hour

Edith Survives Lodore

Edith launched on Lodore on May 26 for a four-day run through Lodore and Split Mountain Canyon. The power plant at Flaming Gorge was spinning as fast as it could ast about 4600 cfs. (Although they have since opened the spillways and ramped up to about 8000.) O.A.R.S. Inc was gracious enough to add me as crew (interpreter / storyteller) on a small three-passenger trip. Weather was cold and a bit rainy, but my gourd, it was beautiful up there.

Edith put up a fight in most rapids, not really wanting to pivot when I wanted her to, but in the end, we came through pretty much unscathed. I did rumble a rock in Hell's Half Mile, but there were none of those crunchy crackly sounds and no visible damage. Here's a link to my run in Hell's Half Mile, with my bone-head move toward the end, jarring the camera.

Edith in Hell's Half Mile

After the Yampa boomed in we had about 23,000 cfs--the largest water Edith has seen. Split Mountain Canyon was huge.

I did two dory runs on the San Juan, before and after Edith's Lodore run--fantastic river, great folks, good water, great weather, fun music. I am back home now, about to give Edith a nice rub-down and rest for the summer.

Edith Survives Grand Canyon

To my utter astonishment, we made it through upright. She's a wet one, that Edith, and really tough to pivot, but with good ballasting, very stable. I went as an interpreter/storyteller on an Arizona Raft Adventures (AzRA) trip, so in addition to telling stories I got to be one. I'm heading right back out on the river but here are a few videos:

Horn Creek

Granite Falls

Hermit Rapid

Crystal Rapid

Serpentine Rapid

Upset Rapid

Lava Falls

The View Downstream

Here are the shots looking downstream in those last two rapids.

Big Drop Two: At about 1:10 - 1:15 I am passing the rock that ate our raft.

Big Drop Three. This really shows how freaky and tight this run is.

Edith and Brad in the Big Drops

Here are a couple low-res clips from the Cataract trip. We had those cute little GoPro cameras mounted on the foredeck for the rapids. The videos look way better with the big files on the big screen but this gives you a feeling of what the Edith is like in the big splashy stuff: really wet.

Been Hurt Island 

A short, wet, funky drop, just upstream of Big Drops One, Two, and Three.

Big Drop Two

A fast cut behind a rock, moving from left to right. The big rock I go past toward the end of this shot flipped our raft.

Big Drop Three
This one was a bit puckery. Although both raft folks made it to shore, the raft had a violent, ugly, upside-down run here. It is a blind entry with monstrous holes and pourovers adjacent to the one, oh-so-thin, ever-so-narrow, truly sweet line. Sliding through there made me smile. And spit.

Edith got another coat of Linseed oil-Turpentine-Varnish today in preparation for her Grand Canyon trip in a few days. Although I thought I might have all sorts of re-design and retrofitting to do after the Cataract shake-down, there really wasn't much I wanted to change. We got her right the first time—as right as you can get a Galloway boat.

Edith in Cataract Canyon

Here are three shots by Kate Thompson of Edith and myself in Cataract Canyon last week. (You can see more of Kate's fabulous imagery at www.katepics.com)

Edith is a wet girl, hence my international orange arctic seas anti-exposure suit. It looks so hideously bright in these pictures I have dyed in a lovely shade of monkeypoo brown for next week's Grand Canyon trip.

Edith in the Wild

We got off the river last night and drove back into a Flagstaff blizzard. Brr—glad to be in a house and off a frigid sandstorming beach. But the trip was great—five days of flatwater down to Cataract Canyon, and a few days in the rapids.

So, one might wonder. What's a Galloway boat like to row?

Wet. Awkward. Slow to turn. But fast, easy to power through the wind, and kind of fun in its own sick, weird, twisted way. The eight-foot oars are both too long and too short at the same time. A bit too long for a 45" oarlock-to-oarlock canoe—it is impossible to get enough leverage inside the oarlock to take a good, mighty stroke; yet the oar is too short to really get the boat moving in the big water. The other thing is that with its long, narrow profile, she draws water from end to end and is near impossible to pivot in the big water. Oh—and the stern, which is the downstream end of the boat, is low enough so that even modest waves crash over it, crash over the splashboard, and land squarely in my face and the oversize cockpit, which quickly swamps. These are problems.

But I've rowed worse. The Powell boat is even tougher in big water, being another five or more feet long and no wider. What I came to realize is that the Galloway style boat is far closer to an Powell boat than I had imagined, far more distant from the Nevills boat that superceded it. Truly a transitional hull, but it is small wonder that the Nevills boat eclipsed it so suddenly and definitively in 1938. I had expected Edith to row somewhat like the Holmstrom boat I built ten years ago, since that was a modified Galloway, being the same lines, but shortened a foot and a half and widened nearly a foot. Not even close. Holmstrom was far further ahead of his time than I had guessed.

But I think with a bit of forethought and a bit of luck, Edith and I will make it through Grand Canyon this month.

Somehow with all the wind and chill, I forgot to take many pictures. I hope to share a few more that others took, along with a clip or two of video. But here are a few shots from Tower Park on the Green River.