VTR No. 28: Running a Sweep Boat Down the Middle Fork at 2.4 feet

[@TaylorGudmundsen]

Thank you for allowing this 75 yr. old to relive some great memories! 30+ times down this river ...

[@90Duck]

Cramer was new and HUGE when we ran the river in July of 2005. The guides were warning the private groups about it since Cramer Creek had just blown out that spring and it wasn't on anybody's river maps. I've done the river several times since then and each year it smooths out more so that is just a big waver train now, but the hole at the top spanned the channel so there was no cheating around it. It was definitely a Grand Canyon-esque rapid when it first formed! I've some great pictures someone took from the road of us running through it.

[@SethNeal]

I really enjoyed watching that! Different perspective for sure!

[@GearGarageTV]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@dmeat2430]

Got some sun on those legs over that trip! Haha🤙🏻

[@MichaelMerrifield]

I imagine the oar blades on a sweep boat can act like rudders on a boat. You don't have a long sweeping arc beyond the pivot point so they don't really behave like a typical oar. In a sail boat, the foils in the water (centerboard and rudder) require flow in order to achieve lift. The lift makes them bite or become effective in making the boat go straight (assuming rudder is straight ahead) rather than the boat being pushed sideways by the wind. Also, if you have no flow, you have no steerage. IOW, the rudder is not able to turn the boat. Once the boat has some speed, flow over the foils makes them effective. I imagine it could be something like this that makes the sweep boat oar blades more effective when the boat has some speed relative to the current.

[@jonasherzog2609]

Do you have video of the sweep running Jackass? I kissed some rocks there while driving a sweep boat.

[@GearGarageTV]

I ran the far right that trip which was uneventful and boring

[@mfabramczyk]

I'm not sure if USGS recently installed this, but there's now a gauge at the mouth. I'm going to start using this to get an idea of the bottom third of the river. On our June 4 launch, the trends of this gauge tracked with the MF Lodge gauge - absolute values were higher on the lower gauge but the graph trended in the same direction: waterdata.usgs.gov/monitoring-location/13310199/#parameterCode=00060&period=P7D