Viewing the Jet Boats at the Rapids
Before we get to Carol's and my Jet Boat ride and the spectacular photos, I would like to show you what we did on the day after our ride. Because passengers get soaked on this ride, using a good camera is out of the question. Besides, we wanted to photograph the boat going through its maneuvers from the bank. Carol came up with the idea of trying to find a way down the steep Niagara River Gorge to the river to do just that. After many stops along the road paralleling the river, we finally found a way down. Here it is...
From a rest stop parking area, we found this stairway leading down to a path running along a ledge. Then we saw a dirt trail, hopefully leading downward to the river. We took it.
This is the long trail descending the gorge. The red stripe on the tree marks our trail, but on the way back we missed some of them and ended up on another trail (there were also black, blue and green markers). We ended up further away from the stairs which would take us back to the parking area.
Amazingly, about half way down to the river we stumbled upon the Whirlpool Jet Boat photographer. He had a neat little tent-like setup in the woods, and his job was to take action photos (with his high powered digital camera) of each jet boat as it went through the Class V rapids. He would immediately transmit the pictures back to homebase with his lap top computer where the photos would be printed out and ready to be purchased when the passengers returned from their trip.
This is a photo taken of some of the rapids as we were walking down the trail.
Here we are - finally down at the river's edge where we can take our own pictures as the jet boats go through the rapids. We know we are in a good spot because we're very close to where the professional photographer is positioned.