Rio Marañon #2: Near Disaster at the Start

Rigging with unfamiliar equipment takes a while. But 12 out of 13 of our group are experienced rafters, so we’ve got this.  The folks who rode to the put-in with the gear truck already had the boats blown up and the gear unloaded when the rest of us arrived from the airport. So we all jumped in and finished the work in a matter of a few hours. It was warm on the open rocky beach, but cloudy, so the temperature was very tolerable. We decided to assign boats to people for the trip so that everyone would be responsible for rigging a particular boat each day. Joe and I took the green boat, because our Colorado rafting company has green boats. Our sons, Ben and Ethan took the orange boat, Glenn, Jane and Larry took the yellow boat, Steve and his girlfriend Rachel took the red cataraft, Hal and Dude took the blue boat, and Glenn volunteered to rig the blue paddle boat. Will and Chris, who would kayak, jumped in and helped where needed. Steve and Chris already had dysentery from something they ate or drank in Trujillo, and both were clearly feeling very poorly. Joe and I felt glad that Glenn was at least somewhat familiar with catarafts and could help Steve rig. We didn’t request a cataraft for the trip and were a bit surprised that we were given one by the outfitter, SierraRios. Anyway, rigging went fairly smoothly, and shortly after lunch we were loaded and ready to launch.

This was a special group of old and new friends from all corners of the U.S., plus our two Peruvian kayaker guides, Pedro and Freddy, who we already could tell were going to be excellent. Pedro had somewhere around 15 Rio Marañon trips under his belt and knew the river, its issues and its people well. He also spoke English well and was a very likeable person.  Freddy was an expert kayaker, but only 18 years old, with no English at all. But our group had four fluent Spanish speakers, Ben, Will, Larry, and Rachel. Ben, Will and Ethan, our youngest group members at 22, 20, and 19, bonded quickly with Freddy, and he worked his way into the rest of our hearts in short order. 

It was a momentous thing to launch our outfitted private trip on the Rio Marañon. This wasn’t just any trip—this was the primary source of the Amazon River! In Peru! In the wilderness! We all had silly grins plastered on our faces, and felt giddy with the excitement of it.  We were about to become a floating community, together for better or for worse for two entire weeks. As we pushed the boats off from the shore, we merged with the river in a physical and an emotional way. So began the trip of a lifetime!!

I had chosen to start off in the paddle boat. It felt good to pull my paddle through the silty gray-brown water in concert with the others. We launched last, after the cataraft, knowing we would float faster than the oar boats and catch up quickly. The breeze in our faces, the strong current carrying us…perfect…

Suddenly a rafter’s whistle cut shrilly through the air. A whistle? We’d only been on the river for less than a minute—what, somebody fell out? Tree across the river? We looked around frantically for the source of the whistle. It was the cataraft. Steve was blowing his whistle insistently. He was sinking! The cataraft was sinking!

Steve is tall and very strong. At another time it might have been comical to see him waist deep in the river with his Tully-hatted head bobbing well below the handles of the oars. But in this case, it was a true emergency. His boat was falling apart and there was absolutely nothing he could do about it. He was carrying all the safety, first aid and repair gear, as well as two huge coolers full of food and several river bags full of personal gear.

The group sprang into action. Our paddle crew paddled hard toward him, but he was floating downstream fast, his boat sunk deep in the current. We could see him struggling bravely to try to control the floundering craft, but with little success. To compound his troubles, a rapid was coming up fast. The rapid was along the right side of the river on a left-hand bend. The current pushed into the shore. Steve was helpless. Slowly we were gaining on him in the paddle boat, but not fast enough. Joe, in the green raft, was downstream of Steve’s cataraft. He slowed down and positioned himself between Steve and the shore as the current accelerated into the rapid.

Joe pulled away from the shore directly in front of the cataraft, so that the sinking red craft ran into Joe’s stern, and he was able to hold the cataraft off the shore. After the rapid, which was relatively small by big volume river standards, Pedro climbed aboard Joe’s raft, pulled his kayak on board after him and caught a rope thrown by Rachel from Steve’s boat. With Joe rowing frantically, they attempted to pull the cataraft into the eddy on the left side of the river. Our paddle boat caught up to the scene just at the end of the rapid and paddled hard into the cataraft, pushing it toward the eddy as Pedro and Joe pulled. The other boats had eddied out and members of the group ran upstream to help catch Joe’s boat and the cataraft. In probably five minutes, it was over, and the boats were safely ashore, but it was a close call.

Our adrenaline was pumping, and we all immediately jumped in to figure out what had happened and to fix the cataraft. What had happened was a silly mistake, which is all it takes to cause disaster on a river trip. While rigging the boats at the put-in, group members had become distracted by the excitement of our arrival from the airport with Glenn’s missing bags in tow. As a result, the frame of the cataraft did not get tied off to the bottom side of the pontoons, and being hidden on the bottom of the boat, no one noticed the omission as rigging proceeded. Most of the group had no experience with catarafts, and didn’t know to check. When the cataraft launched into the current, the pontoons rolled outward and the frame and its contents sank between them. So, in the eddy a few minutes downstream of the put-in, we re-rigged the cataraft, making sure we had it right. Poor Steve, who was weak from dysentery to start with, was exhausted and a little out of it, but he still tried to help as best he could. In the end, we only lost a sand stake for tying up the boats on the beach at night, and an oar lock. It could have been much worse.

Our giddiness was gone. This had been a close call, and we vowed not to be so careless again. But it was also a bonding experience, the first of many on our descent, and the group was stronger for it.  When we pushed into the current again, we felt more grounded, but also optimistic. Yes, we had made a silly and dangerous mistake, but our group had responded with calm clarity and professionalism. This was not our first rodeo. We were going to be okay.

To raft and/or help protect the Rio Marañon, contact SierraRios at www.sierrarios.org.

Read more entries in our ten-part series about the Rio Marañon.