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Whenever the raft was not tied up to shore or sitting on the shore, Arlen and I wore PFDs (personal flotation devices). It's an essential precaution on all water trips. It was obvious that, if one of us was to go overboard while the raft was traveling in the swift-moving tide, that person could very quickly end up way down current of the raft. We towed a canoe with us the first two years, and a two-person kayak the other years. Our first day traveling on the river, we practiced throwing our safety line; luckily we have never had a person-overboard emergency that required one of us to use it for real.
Weekdays, one can really appreciate the natural sights and sounds of the river; there is little human interference and traffic. Summer weekends can be different, though. Boats, mostly loud motorboats and jet skis, race by. Since most of our trip was along undeveloped stretches of the river and on weekdays, we were mostly able to appreciate the river in privacy.
Throughout planning for the 1998 trip, I obsessed over tide charts. I knew we would only be able to move as the tide allowed, I knew that keeping the tide in mind at all times would be key to a successful trip. In hindsight, almost all of that tide-chart obsessiveness was a waste of energy. Once we were on the river, I was aware of the slightest shift in tide, all the time. I rarely took the tide charts out of the storage bin. When we needed to wake up extra early, in order to travel with the tide, I was able to do so, always without an alarm clock. By total luck, we had low tides in the middle of the nights on our first trip. Since then, we tried to plan for this on our other trips as much as possible. I liked making sure the raft was settled down on the shore before going to sleep, and then not being rocked by the incoming tide until early morning sometime. I'm a light sleeper, and would sleep little if we were rocking in the wind and waves, or pounding into rocks and trees. Actually, I adjusted to the peace of the river and the rhythms of our days, and slept pretty well, all in all. Arlen did his usual sound-as-a-rock sleep thing out on the river.
Being on and next to the water affected me in ways I didn't fully anticipate. After our 1998 trip, I swayed for days. It took me a long time to get my land legs back. This seemed especially surprising since much of our time on the trip had been spent on shore. Arlen laughed at me; he came away steady and unaffected. I went back to work the day after we got back from the 1998 trip, but ended up having to go home midday, I felt so nauseous. I continued to grip table tops and walls to steady myself for days.
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