I thought I'd share a couple of stories, and see if y'all would want to chime in with jet horror stories of your own...
The number one rule of jets is know your river. Easier said than done, I know, but nothing makes for a bad day like going from 30mph to zero instantly. All it takes is one rock and the water being a little lower than you're used to. Couple of years back, a few local "quasi-Federal agency" boys learned how to fly on the Caney when they blasted through a run without scouting it first at low-water and hung up on a ledge; everyone on the boat got ejected and thrown into a rocky riffle head-first. Luckily no one was seriously injured.
Last summer I was having a couple of beers around a campfire with a couple of (Western) fisheries biologists, when one of them shared a story from a survey effort on a remote Wild & Scenic river. They were about 15 miles from the nearest road in an 21' Alaskan inboard jet, when they picked a channel and headed upstream through a shallow reach. The other biologist onboard had run the same reach a month earlier without incident, and it looked deep enough from their vantage point downstream. They rounded a bend at a high rate of speed and the water just disappeared; the main channel had shifted during high flows. They buried the boat deep in a gravel bar (It's really amazing how far onto a bar a jet will go when it has some momentum behind it!). After a full day of trying to dig it out, they hadn't made any progress, and had to abandon the boat and hike out. They were able to return a couple of days later with a rubber-tired dozer; luckily, the boat was still there and they were able to extract it without further incident.
Over the past couple of years I've been doing a lot of electrofishing surveys with a jet sled; one of my co-workers (who always seemed to be operating the boat) never caught on that while reckless speed without knowing the run is dangerous, being overly timid has its downside, as well. I can't count the number of times we pushed that dang boat (a 16' welded with a 60/40 4 cycle, loaded to the gills with a 5500W generator, electrofishing equipment, and a 75 gal livewell -- HEAVY!!) off of gravel bars. Sweat, strains, slips, and a bit of unsavory language always followed his driving. On one particular day, he buried the boat three times in a row, easing off the throttle at the same place each time, just when he should have been keeping on it. Keep in mind we'd already run this reach that day going downstream; it was clean gravel without any big rocks or ledges. Easy. I finally mutinied, took command of the boat, and ran the riffle without incident. A come-along is a very useful thing to keep in your rig when you're running bony water...
Also be aware of the effects of adding weight in the middle of a run; another site was a long ways downstream of the access, so I scouted carefully on the way down, and even stopped and made a couple of cairns on the bank to mark serious obstacles. Three other members of our crew accessed the site with a canoe that they slid down a steep hill from a road about 300 yards away from the river. When we'd finished our survey for the day, we loaded up the samples that the other crew had collected, plus one of the guys and their gear so they could haul the canoe back to their vehicle easier. I didn't think the extra weight would make that much of a difference, but it did -- we couldn't get back up through, and after a couple of tries I had to make two of the guys carry equipment past the sketchy areas while I ran them.
Hopefully this will keep someone from duplicating some of these mistakes...
Topic: "Oh yeah, you can make it through there..." (Read 2916 times)