Yes Mr. Garcia, I had a very satisfying trip; so much so that I really enjoyed sleeping in yesterday and today.

Thanks for the hint Stam, you clown. I'm sure we had at least 2 thermometers between us, preventing us from including a few cases of beer in our cargo. I thought your secret was having all 3 of you cozy up in a 2-man mountain tent. I'll check with Coley for more details on packing light. Truly I thought I was packing "light." I even went out and bought a high falutin' 16 oz. air mattress to offset my 3.5# basecamp thermarest to shave off some weight. However, the notion of 8 consecutive nights of freeze dried dinners turned me off. So I filled a 15 qt. cooler with 4 frozen dinners and breakfasts I prepared at home. I put the vacuum packed meals in the cooler, filled it half way with water (in 2 stages) and put the whole she-bang in the freezer. That worked very well, including driving through 100* heat on the ride up, giving us 4 fresh dinners in camp. But it added 26# to the load. Then we went freeze dried for the remainder. It kept me from starving. My gear, WM, and self weighed in at 399#. Even if I were to lose 10 or 15#, that's still a lot of weight.

Notes from the chronicles:

Overheard from one angler bathing in the river one sunny afternoon -"If April Vokey doesn't saunter by about now, that's her loss." Enough of joking about Ms. Vokey however. You'll read why.

About the river, there are lots of rapids, class II and III I think. Watermasters are rated to class IV, but I suspect that is only true if the operator is also rated to class IV. I can attest that a Watermaster loaded down with an extra 140# of camping larder is far less maneuverable than with a typical day load. This is worth mentioning because David got too close to a large rock, with his raft sideways, and capsized just downstream from the slide (recognizable by the half a mountain that slid away recently). He was able to stay with his raft and didn't pop the cord on his inflatable PFD until the raft was caught in the main current and moving toward the downed logs and trees along the left bank. At that point he swam for the right bank where one of April's clients grabbed him by the yoke. April, who's other client was playing a fish from the boat, put him ashore and to her credit ran her boat up and moved David's raft away from the logs and over to safety on the right bank. The young woman has my respect for her generosity and river skills.

All's well that ends well as they say, but talk about a white knuckle moment when we couldn't see where David was. Hence a critical reminder about keeping boats away from log jams and never get sideways on the upstream side of a rock that is bigger than your boat. All David suffered was the loss of two rod sections, a bit of pride, and a total soaking. I rowed the river with standard WM oars, but if I were doing it again I'd upgrade to the heavy duty ones and sacrifice some weight elsewhere. The heavy duty oars have a longer ferrule - a natural weak spot - and heavier gage tubing.

Other random thoughts:

I've known guys that for years flew in to the lower Dean and camped for a week or two, fishing the available water. One thing that made me grateful for floating the river was how little water is available to the stationary campers and to the clients of the upper-most and lower-most lodges. But I don't like to fish the same water over and over. Two huge back-to-back floods in 2010 and 2011 totally changed the lower Dean according to folks who have fished it for many years. The Totem club has moved their camp from river right to river left where they now have access to only 3, maybe 4 pieces of water, and only one of them is truly high quality based on my overview. The old Motel run of long term fame is straight, shallow, and fast, although it does have a good piece at its lower end. It produces a lot of fish, but only because every fish pauses there briefly to rest after cresting the lower canyon. But it's not a very cool pool to fish IMO.

My camera still won't work, but the memory card is OK, and I uploaded the photos to my computer. When I get some re-sized I'll post them up.

Sg