Had a great Thanksgiving with the family! Although.....The agenda for the next day (Friday) was a half day canoe trip on the Withlacoochee River which went horribly wrong at the very end of the trip (after about 3 1/2 hours of peaceful and successful canoeing).. It was My uncle (in a kayak), my cousin and his girlfriend in 1 canoe, and my cousins friend and myself in another canoe. Below is some footage from the location of the crash the next morning. This is the canoe that I was in, I was in the back, and Kevin a friend of my cousin, was in the front (of that canoe). My cousin (Jason) and his girlfriend (Misti) had just crashed their canoe, about 30-40 feet in front of Kevin and I, because of a downed tree in combination with the speed and force of the water. This is a (maybe class 1 rapid) and we obviously underestimated its power and potential for danger! With our canoe heading right for my cousin and his girlfriend, Kevin and I tried to back petal to avoid collision (no such luck) and ended up going down as well just before running into them. After going down, our canoe then collided into my cousin and his girlfriend knocking away the canoe that they were using. This is where the worst part happened. The canoe that I was in, ended up trapping my cousins girlfriend by the ankle, between the canoe and a rock/downed tree (you can see where the canoe is bent. this is where her leg was). The force of the water was so strong that it bent the fiberglass canoe right in the middle where Mistis leg/rock/downed tree was. Keep in mind, the water was roughly chest deep in front of the canoe at this spot. We tried to get her free for nearly 10 minutes with no luck. The force of the water bucketing into the canoe was too strong for us 3 guys to even get it to budge. We had absolutely no idea what would happen, or what to do. We were in the middle of nowhere with no other help, I was really freaking out! Out of nowhere, completely randomly, you can call it a miracle or whatever, but a 2X4-like piece of driftwood bumped Misti in her leg. With that piece of wood, Jason and Kevin were able to pry the canoe away freeing Misti, using it vertically like a pry-bar, as you can see still sticking up in the video. Now after Misti was free, we all got out of the river, half hypothermic from spending over 10 minutes in the freezing water and dropping outside temperatures and were pretty freaked, to say the least. Luckily, we had passed a fisherman about a half mile down the river, who was drunk, and drove us to safety, to a local agricultural center. We had no other options.. We arrived safely and ended up meeting with our family at the agricultural center. Earlier I mentioned that my uncle was with us for the trip. While all of this was happening, my uncle was a ways behind us as both of the canoes crashed, and wisely chose a different path through the rapids. He was in a kayak, and if he tried to take the same path to help, he most likely would have crashed too and it could have been a potentially worse situation. None of us (in the canoes) were wearing our life jackets, we were extremely lucky, to say the least! After everything, everyone went home without serious injury and this is definitely a thanksgiving we will never forget!
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 02:22:58 +0000
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