Labor Day Sabine Trip
Sept. 1st-3rd, 2012
by Harmon Everett
Philip and Tisha Matticks sent out an e-mail late Thursday night saying they had been watching the radar and the forecasts showed the remnants of Hurricane Isaac still threatening almost constant thunderstorms on Saturday in the Sabine area, so they were canceling the official HCC trip. One of a trip leader’s greatest responsibilities is to decide when the conditions will be too dangerous for a group to take a trip, and it is always a difficult decision.
Legally, and by HCC policy, that ended the HCC participation. There was too little time for me to send out another HCC invitation, even if I thought I wanted to.
But Terry and I were all packed, and we didn’t have alternate plans and as we watched the radar all day Friday and the water gages were going up and down as normal, we decided to go anyway. Legally, that means we were on our own, and if anything happened, it would be all our own responsibility.
We went along the northern route, as much because Terry lives near Humble, as that I dislike driving along I-10 to Beaumont. We drove up 59 to Livingston, and then across 190 to Jasper and then to Burkeville and the Burr’s Ferry Bridge across the Sabine, arriving about half an hour before dark. It was a very pleasant drive and quite different from the madhouse dash across 10 and then up to Burkeville that I had taken in the past.
There were very few people camped out, as opposed to past years when a veritable tent city would be spread out along the beach under the bridge. A stray dog, maybe a female great dane, came to visit as we were putting up our tent. One of the other campers thought the dog may have been dumped there by someone to get rid of her. We were in no position to rescue her, but the other camper did give her a bowl of dog food.
We were trying a couple of new things on this trip. Our mattress pads have become increasingly uncomfortable lately, so we were trying a couple of different styles of inflatable pool-type air mattresses – cheap and small to pack. Also, we had seen Christy’s portable toilet-with-bags system, but didn’t see how we would transport it on a kayak, so we purchased a separate seat, and developed a plywood top for a milk-crate that would serve as a toilet using the same bag system. We already carried milk crates, and the top-and-toilet seat easily packed on the kayak. We were also trying a trick that Mike Pollard taught me – we left a cooler filled with bottles of ice and a hunk of dry ice in the Jeep at the take-out, so that when we arrived at the take-out we would have ice cold water to drink.
The new toilet seat on-a-milk-crate is very stable and seems to be working just fine. The cheap air mattresses were difficult to blow up, difficult to sleep on and squeaky, and deflating and packing them up took ages.
Ron Nunnely, Milton Robertson, and Bob Pearson showed up and expeditiously loaded their canoes. Phil from Beaumont set up his covered canoe/kayak/fishing boat thingy. Danny came by bright and early and started unloading the canoes people had rented, and then announced he was heading off to do a shuttle at 7:15. I had been preparing to go along for a shuttle at his pre-scheduled time of 8:00 am, and was no where near ready. He promised he would run a second shuttle when he came back. We redoubled our efforts to deflate the air mattresses.
One of the other gentlemen on the shuttle had a multi-function watch that told him the temperature, and also was a GPS unit, so I was able to capture the coordinates of the take-out so Terry could put them into her GPS and we could track our progress and distance to the take-out along the way.
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Terry starting out |
By the time we got back to the bridge, everyone else was ready to go, and Terry and I were the last to get on the water.
A couple of times we heard thunder, and a couple of times there were torrential downpours – but the thunder didn’t happen when it was raining, so we just kept paddling through the rain. Otherwise, there wasn’t very much headwind, and we had started off during a high water portion of the water release cycle from the Toledo Bend Reservoir upstream, so we had very few downed trees to dodge.
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Raining and
sunshine |
Downpour coming
around the corner |
Downpour arrived |
Calm between
the downpours |
Raining again |
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| Classic Old Town |
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Two of the guys were paddling a classic canoe. The owner explained it was his grandfather’s – an Old Town wood-and-canvas from 1910 or so.
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Ron and Bob |
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Terry dragging boat
to campsite |
We found Milton, Ron and Bob hanging out at the first camp, and pulled in to set up our camp in a shady spot. Over the next hour or two, the rest of the paddlers stopped in and set up their camps. Terry hadn’t tried her camp stove out in a couple of years, so this gave her a good opportunity to cook up a Lipton noodle-and-broccoli mix.
Tired from a good day of paddling, we turned in for the night.
I then almost got into a fist fight.
I don’t know if I’ve EVER gotten upset with somebody on a paddling trip. I have often been frustrated with the weather, and once or twice along the Pecos I was convinced the universe was out to get me, but I don’t think I have ever been really angry with anybody on a trip.
After settling down, and almost drifting off to sleep, some guy in the group between us and the river started shooting off fireworks. These weren’t little pop-pop-poppers. These were almost commercial grade rockets and explosives that rained down hot embers near our tent. He had to set up his mortars in several places and build up a berm around them to stabilize them. They were several feet tall and 3 or 4 inches across.
Terry asked him if he could please stop, because we wanted to go to sleep. Phil, who had set up his tent next to ours, chimed in that he also would like to sleep.
The guy shouted back that he was exercising his ‘equal opportunity,” and that he was going to continue. He had purchased these fireworks on the 4th of July specifically to shoot off on this trip and he was going to do so. Phil said that fireworks were not in his plan for the evening. The guy shouted back something about what planet he was from, and if Phil wanted to make an issue out of it, he would take him on.
I said that camping here was a group activity and he hadn’t asked the rest of the group if they wanted the fireworks. The guy and Phil continued to exchange insults, while I tried to calm Phil down, not being very calm myself. I told Phil that continuing to let the guy upset him was like letting an inconsiderate A#$@#%#$^^ live rent-free in his head, and not to let him.
Evidently, someone from the guy’s group was also talking to the guy, and after yelling at us for a while, including a threat to shoot some more of them off at 3:00 am, he quieted down, and the other group went back to hanging out by their campfire.
The next morning, Phil quietly got up early, packed and left. As he was leaving, an old guy from the other group hopped into a canoe, caught up with Phil, and evidently apologized for his son.
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Terry on
Sunday Morning |
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Water level shown
on the bank |
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Starting out on Sunday morning, the water level was on the low section of the two-day release cycle from the Toledo Bend Reservoir, so you could see the waterline from the high water mark two feet higher along the bank and we had to dodge a lot more trees than on Saturday.
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Big Cow Creek coming
in on the right |
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Cooling off before
setting up camp |
Otherwise, it was a very nice day to paddle. We stopped for lunch. We stopped a couple of times for swimming breaks, and then passed Big Cow Creek coming in from the right, and knew that the second night’s camp was just a couple of bends around the river.
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| Setting up camp in wind |
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We set up camp. We set up a tarp and the rain fly for shade. We set up our new toilet. Ron made red beans and rice and venison sausage and shared with everybody. Terry and I took out our water filters and practiced filtering water. Both our water filters are Katydins, but Terry’s has a ceramic pre-filter that got seriously brown and clogged from filtering out gunk from the Sabine. We went to REI after the trip and asked what to do about it. It turns out the ceramic filters get scruffed with a scotchbrite pad to clean them. Ya learn new things every day. After we filtered the water with the Katydins, I used a Steri-pen to further sterilize the filtered water with UV light. It tasted great! And nobody got sick.
The fireworks family came by. Terry is fearless and asked if they were going to shoot off fireworks again this night. They answered yes, but they were going to continue on and camp on a sand bar further down the river away from our group. We appreciated their consideration. The fireworks did indeed go off around 10 pm that night, but since we expected them, and they were a quarter of a mile away or so, they were not as abrupt an intrusion into the trip as they had been on Saturday night.
It didn’t rain that night, but we woke up a little wet inside the tent anyway. Note to self: When you set up a shade tarp, make sure you don’t set it up so that it turns into a dew catcher that drains into the tent...
We determined that the cheap air mattresses were not quite worth what I had paid for them. OK, we will get the expensive backpacking air mattresses. OK? Early Christmas presents?
We passed the bearded tree, and then Anacoca creek came in from the Louisiana side, turning the river almost black with tannic acid and tree waste, and we knew that it was only a couple of hundred yards to the takeout and Danny with his 4-wheel to help drag us out to the parking lot. The dry ice was gone from the cooler in the jeep, but a couple of the bottles still had ice, which was a very welcome treat. Thank you, Mike!
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| Bearded Tree |
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Anacoca Creek
coming in from Left |
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Danny coming down
to help drag boats up |
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Parking lot at
the take-out |
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| Harmon Everett |