Paddling with Mike Svob
Reality check
Canoe & kayak accidents in Wisconsin & Illinois 
| This Fox River dam in Yorkville, Illinois, has claimed many lives. Note the recirculating hydraulic at its base. Photo by Mike Svob |
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Compared with many other recreational activities, paddling is a relatively low-risk sport. Even those of us addicted to it
and pushing the limit on occasion can point to a litany of scrapes, bumps, strained backs and close calls. But make no mistake about it: An element of risk is always there, no matter what kind of paddling we do.Just as we take this fact for granted, something occurs to put us on our guard again. During my just concluded monthlong tour of Wisconsin, gathering and fact-checking material for my guidebooks and for this column, I was repeatedly
reminded of how people can get themselves into big trouble on the water. Two incidents on the Black River
As early as the second day of the trip – a drizzly day when the temperature barely got into the 40s – I pulled up to the spot on the Black River where avid whitewater paddlers usually begin their trips from the Hatfield Dam to the powerhouse or to Halls Creek Landing. When the water is high, as it was on that day, this is an exhilarating but
dangerous high-volume stretch that is appropriate only for highly skilled and well-equipped whitewater enthusiasts.
uddled inside my poncho, I had just returned from a walk along the riverbank to view the awesome and unrunnable Class III-V drops upstream from the put-in. I was just about to leave when a very nice young couple arrived at the put-in trail and began to unload their Coleman canoe sans flotation bags, helmets or
wet suits. In the course of a conversation with them, I tried to gauge their skill level and experience. Then I went on and on about the hazards of the trip they were about to begin. They, however, seemed determined to undertake the adventure anyway. I forebodingly wished them luck as they began to carry their canoe down the trail toward the put-in. Ten minutes later, filled with guilt that I hadn't done more to dissuade them and knowing that I wouldn't
sleep well that night, I made an abrupt U-turn on the rain-slickened pavement south of Hatfield, sped back to the Black, and ran with urgency down the long trail to where, fortunately, the couple was still on the shoreline, putting their boat into the water. Knowing for sure that they were about to have an awful experience, I assumed a very aggressive "Don't go,
damn it" stance with them. It worked. In fact, they seemed relieved and even grateful that I had returned.
About a week later as I was swinging back through the area, I stopped by the DNR office in Black River Falls. There I learned about another paddler who had not fared so well on the Black.
A couple of days earlier, friends had dropped off a canoeist at the landing just north of the Black River Falls
dam, from which he intended to paddle upstream and camp out along the river. The following day someone spotted his canoe floating back down toward Black River Falls, with only the paddler's dog and gear in it. Search-and-rescue operations ensued, and within a few days the body was recovered.
The section on which the canoeist died is a few miles downstream from where I met the young people in the
Coleman, but it's a relatively placid part of the river. Little is known about the circumstances of the incident.
Two 'tamer' rivers
A week later I was reminded once again that canoeing experience isn't always an assurance that bad things won't happen on the water.
My travels through Wisconsin had taken me to the Kinnickinnic River in River Falls, and an unplanned paddle with a gentleman from Stillwater (the first tandem paddling I'd done in a long time). I had fallen in
love with this wonderful river, a new one for me.
Putting in below the dam in town, paddlers experience eight miles of a clear, riffle-and-rapid-filled river flowing through a gorgeous wilderness area known locally as "the canyon." On my day on the river I was left with the impression that it would be a relatively safe place for advanced beginners to experience a little whitewater.
However, I was taken aback when I learned that, some time ago, an experienced canoeist had put-in too close to the turbulent outflow of the River Falls dam and had drowned. I've always bent over backward to convince boaters that they must give dams a wide berth, and this incident is only one of many that underscore this warning.
Also during my recent trip I revisited the city of Sheboygan, where Thill's Marine rents kayaks on the
Sheboygan River. There I was told of an incident in June 2004 when a kayaker tried to run a dam on the river and was caught in the downstream hydraulic. The kayaker swam to safety, but unfortunately, a canoeist who tried to recover the kayak drowned despite wearing a PFD.
Several old dams on the Sheboygan scare the devil out of me (specifically the one in Johnsonville and the two near Kohler), and I do everything I can to warn paddlers about them. You must take-out as far
upstream from a dam as possible and put-in far downstream from the turbulence generated by a dam. I feel strongly that inexperienced paddlers should stay away from dams altogether. It's just not worth it.
Farther north
Eventually my May to June tour took me to my old stomping grounds in northeastern Wisconsin. During a visit with Ralph, the owner of Big Smokey Falls Rafting on the Wolf River, I was reminded that river tragedies are sometimes caused by bad decisions.
Those who have run the Menominee Reservation section of the Wolf know that Big Smokey has two large drops, one on each side of an island. The runnable drop, a heart-stopping Class III, is on the right, while an unrunnable Class V-plus nightmare lies to the left.
While I stood gaping at the latter, Ralph told me of a rafter who had run it with a female friend. The young woman lucked out when the raft got stuck on top of a huge boulder, but it took hours to retrieve the young man's body.
There have, of course, been a number of other rafting deaths on the Wolf over the years but not as many as you might expect, in view of the extremely high volume of raft traffic that goes down the river every year.
By comparison, the Little Wolf tributary is unintimidating with a few relatively mild rapids here and there. But as the owner of a canoe rental business told me during my trip to the area a couple of weeks ago, even
the Little Wolf has claimed lives: a canoeist near Royalton some years ago, and more recently a little girl out tubing.
Tragedy in Illinois
The immediate and primary impulse for this article, however, is not the experiences and anecdotes of my Wisconsin trip. Rather, it is the shock of a terrible story that came out of Illinois on Memorial Day weekend. The tragedy that occurred there is not especially surprising to me, because it involves the notoriously
dangerous dam in Yorkville that had already claimed many lives over the years.
Apparently a kayaker on the Fox River ran the 6-foot dam and was caught in the massive, recirculating hydraulic at its base. Seeing his plight, two wonderful young men ran to his aid but were themselves caught in the backwash, and all three perished.
Ironically, the Illinois DNR had been planning for years to make the dam less dangerous and recently came
up with a redesign that would purportedly make it safer.
The story of the Illinois tragedy is full of lessons concerning the enormous hazard presented by low head dams, the ignorance of the general public about the terrible power of recirculating water below dams, and the selfless courage of many people who see others in peril. For many boaters and fishermen, low heads (and even dams with considerable height) may not seem like a big deal, but the fact is that even
wimpy-looking little 1-foot dams can kill.
Since the triple drowning in Yorkville, the Chicago Tribune has carried a series of stories about the situation. For an overhead view of the Yorkville dam, go to Google Earth (http://earth.google.com), then type in "Yorkville, Illinois." (If you haven't already downloaded Google Earth, it's quick and easy to do so. You'll
find it to be a valuable tool for exploring various paddling locations via satellite imagery.)
Some hard statistics
A look at the boating death statistics for Wisconsin over the past two years lends some perspective, perhaps, to the above incidents. Being a safety fanatic, I have followed these figures carefully for many years. The Wisconsin DNR does a good job of investigating and annually reporting boating accidents.
In some ways, the boating fatality summaries for this two-year period were fairly typical. The great majority involved motorcraft, for instance, and a high percentage involved alcohol and a lack of PFDs. During the past seven years, the annual total of boating deaths has ranged from 16 to 25. Over the past four years, fortunately, the number of canoe, kayak and raft deaths has declined to one or two per year – still too many, of course.
Since 1999, the annual boating death totals for Wisconsin are as follows with the number of canoe, kayak and rafting fatalities indicated in parentheses:
1999 25 (4)
2000 21 (7)
2001 18 (5)
2002 19 (2)
2003 16 (1)
2004 24 (2)
2005 22 (2)
The 2004 canoe and kayak fatalities involved the Sheboygan River drowning referred to above, and the hypothermia death of a sea kayaker on Lake Superior. Last year's canoe and kayak deaths were both quite
unusual: one involved a motorboater who borrowed a canoe to retrieve his drifting motorboat, only to capsize and drown, while the other appears to have been the result of a lake kayaker who suffered a seizure, fell from the boat and drowned.
A breakdown of the total deaths by type of watercraft provides an idea of the overall nature of the boating safety problem in Wisconsin. Of the 46 boating deaths in the last two years (24 in 2004 and 22 in 2005),
26 occurred in open motorboats and fishing boats, three in cabin motorboats, three on Jet Skis, three in sailboats, two on pontoon boats, two on duck skiffs, two in canoes, two in kayaks, one on a wind surf board, one in a rowboat and one in an airboat.
For further details, the "Wisconsin Boating Fatality Summary 2005 Season" is available at http://dnr.wi.gov/org/es/enforcement/safety/boatstats.htm. For the 2004 statistics, insert "04" after
boat stats. For comparable data on boating accidents and deaths in Illinois, go to http://dnr.state.il.us/law3, then click on "1993-2004 Boating Accident Reports."
On the positive side
I had a lot of great experiences during my recent crisscrossing of Wisconsin and have all kinds of fresh material for Silent Sports readers.
Among other topics, look for articles on the following: The Apple River: More than just tubing; How I came
to love the headwaters of the Wisconsin River; Eight wild miles on the Kinnickinnic; The Vermilion: Illinois' whitewater magnet; Kickapoo River boondoggle: The La Farge Dam project; Running the entire Wisconsin River; Memorable bridges of Wisconsin and Illinois; and more on river access.
Mike Svob is a native Illinoisan and longtime northwoods devotee. He has canoed and kayaked for more
than 30 years in 18 states and several foreign countries but regards Wisconsin as paddling paradise and home. He now spends a majority of the year in Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of Paddling Illinois, Paddling Northern Wisconsin and Paddling Southern Wisconsin, all published by Trails Books.
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