cellini's Diaryland Diary

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The Coffer Dam

Oh, this poor woman.

I matched with a chick on OKC. Dana. Turns out she looks about 20 years older in person in spite of being my age. Wonderful person. Treats people recovering from trauma, which definitely includes me. I decided that despite the fact that she is completely inappropriate for me and my life goals, I should spend time with her.

This idea occurred to me a few weeks ago, to paddle the full length of the James River in Virginia. So I started pitching the idea to editors and sponsors and got some traction. LL B3an is thinking about providing me with equipment.

I took Dana on a preliminary paddle last weekend. The first day went smoothly. We made camp, I caught a decent blue catfish, we fucked in the tent. Woke up, I was massively hungover, and we fucked again.

Towards the end of the day, we came upon a strange, massive wall across almost half of the river. An iron wall. A coffer dam protecting the construction of a draw point for a new reservoir. It forced the current of a section of river I knew well from flatwater to a class 3.

I tried to avoid the rapid, but we were forced by a weird side current into a strainer. A downed tree in the river. I took a few branches in the face before realizing that the canoe was swamping and filling with water because of the force of the tree against my face and body. So I jumped out of the boat.

I swam under the strainer and then surfaced and grabbed the side of the boat, swimming it to the side of another downed tree in the river.

Dana also made it to the tree and then the survival situation began. We were in a small lull in the current with hell on every side and hypothermia setting in. The shore was a 15-20 foot vertical stretch of soil and clay. The current massively swelled up every three minutes or so in what I thought was a random occurrence but later realized was probably the result of the working of the pumps inside of the coffer dam.

12:06 a.m. - 2018-05-01

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