By Jay Young
A bucket boat, circa 1970s, does what bucket boats did best: hold water. Photo: Butch Christian Collection
Imagine you’re running the Upper Gauley on a sunny autumn afternoon. You come around the bend where the Meadow River adds its weight to the trip and stroke into First Drop of Lost Paddle, the longest rapid on the river. The waves are big and fun, and everybody in the boat is soaked. “Stay ready!” yells your guide as you float into the set-up for Second Drop, AKA, Hawaii Five-Oh. “Forward,” she roars, and you plow into the biggest wave on the Gauley with reckless, giggly abandon.
Boom! The front of the raft points skyward and spume fills the air as you punch a hole through the wall of water. The bottom of the world falls out as you crest the wave and drop into a 30-foot-long slide. Boom! You hit the whitewater at the bottom and again the water flies. The river is around you, above you—in your lap.
“One back,” yells your guide. The crew dutifully complies and the boat slips into the current that brings you around Indecision Rock, AKA, Six Pack. A short float later and you hammer into Third Drop, sliding right and into slower moving water. A cheer escapes your guide’s lips and you hoist your paddle for a celebratory high five with your crewmates. You glance around. Smiles fill the raft.
Now imagine that instead of smiles, a half a ton of water fills your boat… and it’s not going anywhere unless YOU bail it.
The rafts we use today are pleasantly self bailing. The boat fills with water, but gravity drains it through a ring of small holes all around the floor, like a floating colander.
Things, however, were not always thus. In fact, the self-bailing raft is a relatively recent innovation, and on the Gauley, you would have been hard pressed to find one prior to 1987.
Len Hanger, who manages river operations for Songer, recalls those days not so fondly.
“When you ran Lost Paddle in a bucket boat,” says Len, “the biggest difference was the weight. Each gallon of water weighs 8 pounds. So, if you took on 100 gallons of water, you just took on 800 pounds that you had to deal with as a guide, but also as a guest in the boat. They had 3-5 extra people worth of weight that they had to move. You had to be stronger, you had to be quicker—and it was difficult!”
Perhaps nowhere on the Gauley is the difference felt so acutely as in the nearly 1/4-mile-long class V, Lost Paddle.
“In Lost Paddle,” says Hanger, “there are four major drops, and after the third major drop, there’s a place to eddy out.”
While you might take a few moments to catch your breath and celebrate in a self-bailer, in a bucket boat, respite was no place to be found. Even in the eddy, the game was still very much on. “In a bucket boat, you stopped and you took a 5 gallon bucket and you bailed the water out, so you could run the fourth drop, which was affectionately called Tumble Home.”
“If you didn’t bail the water,” explains Len, “all you got to do in that fourth drop was tumble home to the bottom of the rapid. That’s how it got its name.”
