Wrap (n): The less-than-ideal situation in which a boat is held against a rock or boulder in the river for an indeterminant amount of time by the force of the current.
When I and seven other guides got to the North Stanislaus this last Sunday morning and hiked down to look at the boat that was wrapped in the first rapid, we were amazed. I personally had never seen a wrap anything like it before. Most of the boat was under water, with a hole backing up on it and pounding it further and further against the rock. Literally half of the boat was wrapped around the left side of the boulder, and the other half wrapped around the right, giving no advantage to pulling from either direction. Of course, the boat had had two days by that point in time to get itself good and stuck: The initial wrap had actually occured Friday afternoon,
when four boats set off to do All-Outdoors’ last trip on the Stan before flows dropped to a level too low to run. In the very first rapid of the day, Beginner’s Luck, two of those four boats wrapped. One of them came off fairly easily, and the other one,well, the other one is still there…
On Sunday, eight of us (none of whom had been on that trip on Friday) met at 9 am on the North Stanislaus with a lot of ropes, pulleys, carabiners, and throw bags. Our mission? To recover that wrapped boat and bring it home. (more…)