Just a bit further up stream, George hooks a nice salmon for dinner.

Today before arriving at this new camp, Andra and I hit a sweeper. The river was wide but narrowing to a deep fast moving channel. The water was washing right to left as it converged into the deep channel with the sweeper.

I was trying to stay as far right as I could without getting hung up in the shallow water. I expected the river to sweep me left toward the tip of the tree as we passed. Unfortunately, I was not far enough to the right and the river swept us right to it. I tried paddling in vain to stay away from it, but the water was so shallow I couldn't get the oars to bite. By the time we reached the deep water it was too late.

I oared against the current in an attempt to maintain our distance from the sweeper, but lost the battle. The water flipped and crushed the raft in seconds. I initially grabbed on to the sweeper but when the raft got crushed underneath the tree it pulled me down with it. The water depth was probably 8 to 12 feet and hauling ass.

When I popped back to the surface I had somehow gotten ahead of the raft and that's not good. I tried to grab the oar frame on the inverted raft to help keep my head up, but the raft would push me underwater. Even though I was wearing a safety belt, I was concerned about my waders filling up with water. I started swimming as hard as I could toward shore and away from the raft. Andra was worse off. She came up under the raft. After realizing where she was, she took a deep breath and went down to get out from under it. We were very lucky. If we had to do it all over again, we'd have jumped out in the shallow water (6 inches) and just muscled the raft around, but by the time I realized we were in trouble, we were already in the deep water. Andra's camera was ruined (the remaining pictures are from our phones and Dave's camera), and I lost my shotgun to the depths. Some of our gear got out from under the cargo net and George and Dave had to go down river to retrieve it. Meanwhile, I found one of the dry bags with Andra's clothes in it. I got her dry and changed while they retrieved the floating dry bags. By the time Dave got back with my clothes bag, my whole body was shaking. It was good to get changed into dry clothes but putting wet waders back on wasn't particularly thrilling. After retrieving the rest of our floating gear, we continued down to this camp spot.