I think a lot of the reason that people get into trouble with drift boats is that outside of steelhead fishing, they have no white water experiance. Floating is an all year thing for the best guys on the sticks..... A guide can show you a certain thing on a certain float, but thats about it. It boils down to how much time do you want to spend at getting good at it. If you want to get up to speed on a section of river.. leave the poles and gear in the truck. You can float about any stretch of any river about three times in the same amount of time as it takes to fish it once. Pick a river you want to fish a lot of the time and learn it first.. sure, fishing may be better some place you don't know but you gotta walk before you can run. Learn every section on it and use the time to see what works best for each trouble spot.

I once bought a brand new trailer from a guy from Portland who put his brand new Alumaweld into the Deschutes for his first ever attempt at running the boat.. He lost everything but his life that day, and was lucky to keep that. Someone told him it was no problem ( someone who knows the river ) and he was not smart enough to understand that " no problem " for one guy can be a real problem for a newbie.