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We stop for the first night at Duches Hole. A hole is really just a place where the land allows someone to drive cattle down to the river to water them. Not much of a place - but it's camp. We have dinner and turn in. Next day we have a bunch of miles to make before camp and before any real rapids. Somewhere along the line Tom realizes that he has forgotten his glasses. I'm not sure the magnitude of the loss but definitely during the trip there are times when it becomes apparent Tom can't see much beyond about 50 feet. I wonder what it would like to be completely blind and raft; to be almost at the total mercy of others. Well, I'm trying to remember back this far. I remember that we hiked at Rock Creek - not a long hike but nice. There is an area where the sage brush had been burned away - perhaps a month or two earlier - and it was interesting to see how quickly the area was recovering. It was also interesting to see the ground laid bare before us - revealing perhaps a farming area of the Fremont. It looked like it to me anyway. Later in the trip we started to get to some places where the eddies were just huge. Eddies are formed when water rushes by an obstruction - say a bank or a big rock and there is a hole left behind the obstruction. Eventually the water starts to fill the hole in - all the way back to where the hole started - so you have this volume of water either small or quite large moving back upstream to fill in the hole. With this rapid and eddy you have a constriction of the river and the rapid is just the water pouring out of the opening fast and deep. Think of it kind of like orange juice pouring out of a pitcher - the water in the pitcher is slow and still but where it is constricted, where you pour it, it forms a fast smooth tongue of liquid. Ok - so imagine this pond of water pouring through a gap and it starts to make these big waves and that's fun. But at the bottom of the waves the water starts to be pulled and pushed around - from the momentum it is carrying and the absence of water on either side of the tongue main body of water. The raft spins on water moving in opposite directions - big chunks of water slam into other chunks and boil up. And the boil moves out from it's center to run into other chunks of water which creates more spinning and chaos. There were at least two eddies that we got into that we went round and round on. The first eddy - I don't recall the rapid that generated it but we swung into the eddy at the bottom of the rapid. Not what I had in mind really but the water is big and pushy and swirly and you get caught in these giant blobs of water moving the wrong way and... in you go. So ok - we are in this eddy and we go back to the top of the rapid. To get out of the rapid, you need to have enough momentum and a bit of an angle to get up onto the main tongue of water. Not enough speed and you get shoved back into the eddy. Well, we have enough speed but at the bottom, I'm not paying enough attention and with only two paddlers you can't bully your way through the swirls. In we go again. I'm getting pissed because the crew is doing what they can and I'm screwing up. This is what I think - but Angie tells me later that I'm being too hard on myself. We finally breakout - but this happens at least once more at Nefreteeti rapid.
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