• Happy International Mermaid Day! 🧜🏼‍♀️

Ozarks: North Fork White River and Current River MO

Joined
Sep 2, 2011
Messages
7,356
Reaction score
1,314
Location
Raymond, ME
We spent about a week paddling the North Fork of the White River and the Current River in Missouri with a bunch of mostly solo paddlers. Both are spring fed rivers that usually are clear and blue. Recent rains and high water left rivers a little off color. We had nice weatherthe first two days on the North Fork; then things went wet and downhill temperature wise the third fourth and fifth days. Thirteen inches of snow mercifully stayed away 100 miles. Meanwhile at home it was much warmer(40 degrees warmer!)than MO where we did have cold rain just above freezing. Lots of cold rain.

My dog accompanied us.. She still does not know how to paddle. She met her first turtle.
My husband found out that the Raven when bow heavy will not avoid strainers. There was a tricky part where 95 percent of the water moved right and one needed to stay left. He got caught in a snag. It took us some time and a Z drag to get the boat off. Turned out the snag caught the seat webbing and some mighty nice knotcraft by Peter Georg made a nice replacement seat.

Anyway here are some pictures. We did about 90-100 miles total over the week. Note that paddling groups are mostly eating groups in camoflage.

Lucy wants to "help"

















Big Spring Current River..a little floody




Dawt Mill Dam




Portage by the dam.. We had to cross some grass, do a ninety degree turn to the catwalk then rotate boats at the end and walk along that narrow wall. Not a whole lot of fun!



Pat in some sort of Mad River precursor to the ME.. twitchy little thing...anyone know what it is?



Stern view of it at lunch. More correctly First Lunch.



Low water bridges pose some challenges. Sometimes you can paddle over them. Rarely does paddler and boat follow the same course though. Peter Georg here






Over the Falls... a series of ledges with wavetrains and holes.. Terry missed the hole this day. He found it another day. This was actually a dry ride



Bob in his Pyrhana



Another spring.



Lucy vs turtle which kept trying to hide under the canoe



This looks more like a paddle duel than canoeing..whats with the paddles?



Top of the North Fork where its a small river below Topaz



Babiche anyone?



Bow Wow non paddler

 
I knew some of these people. Some from the Internet and I had met Terry (the fuzzy looking guy) and Pete Georg from Connecticut(climbing over bridge)and Pete Blanc from Indiana in the mauve Shaman, and Pat Cannon in the mystery pre ME Mad River and the Bob in the Pirhana before. All post on pnet.

All were soloists. What is a gaggle of soloists called?
 
The choir got a little out of tune. Choir members are not supposed to impale other choir members. I was surfing a wave in the Argosy, lost it and shot sideways out of the slot and into the side of the Bobs Pirhana.. thats a big boat to hit.

I lost.
 
Pat Cannon's boat is a Mad River Flashback, a boat originally designed by John Berry. There is some interesting history behind it. John Berry and Jim Henry both happened to name their fledgling canoe-building businesses "Mad River Canoe" back in the mid 1960s. It is probably anecdotal, but legend has it that the two of them met in a bar somewhere in Vermont or NH around 1971 and flipped a coin to see which one got to keep the name. Henry won and Berry's company became known as Millbrook Canoe, now owned and operated by John Kazimierczyk.

Berry had a somewhat eccentric sense of humor. The MRC canoe known as the Flashback was actually named "The Flasher" by Berry and sported a graphic of a guy exposing himself. I guess this name was a bit too avant garde for MRC and they watered it down to Flashback. The subsequent Berry-designed MRC ME was actually originally named "Maximum Exposure". Another Berry design was/is the "AC/DC". You can read more about it here: http://paddelblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/john-berry.html

The Flasher/Flashback was originally designed as a slalom racer and had a rather low, flat sheerline to facilitate sneaking the ends under slalom gates. This made it a rather wet whitewater boat. MRC molded the hull for about 4 or 5 years, then replaced it with a somewhat deeper version called the Flashback II which they made for only a year, as I recall. That was essentially replaced by the ME which was one of the most successful whitewater open boats that MRC (or anyone else) ever made.

"Kaz" of Millbrook Boats still makes Flashbacks, MEs, and AC/DCs in composite.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top