Big South Fork, KY

Once again we headed down to Kentucky for the yearly spring river trip. This is the fifth year in a row that I've been down here. It may be time to start checking out some other rivers, but I really love it down here. My buddy and I got into Blue Heron late Thursday night. We slept in Friday morning then woke up and starting drinking beer and smoking weed. We left Blue Heron about 3:30 and were lightly scolded for not checking out by noon and not observing the speed limit. We overpaid for our campsite by $5 in the night deposit and I was under the impression that when you overpay you do as you please, I guess they hadn't heard that one. Anyway we got in the river around 6:00 and were already pretty tooled. My buddy tipped over once and fell in a couple times before we reached camp. I would not recommend the Angel Falls portage while drunk, it sucks! We had camp set up and had just started a nice fire when the rain started. He got in my tent to wait out the storm, which ended up lasting all night.

Unfortuantely we drank about half a fifth of whiskey after making camp the night before (keep in mind we'd already been drinking all day) which didn't make for two eager kayakers Saturday morning. The weather stayed cloudy and dreay most of the day which didn't lighten our spirits. The water was moving a little faster on Saturday. The flow was about 500 cfs (Leatherwood Ford guage) on Friday. Saturday it kicked up to about 800. We got on the water Saturday about 2:00 and paddled about 14 miles. The long open stretch from Angel Falls to Station Camp wore us down a bit, but overall the paddle was nice. Luckily we were about out of whiskey. It stayed dry on at night so we were able to get a nice little fire going. Sunday we got going early (12:00) and the water had come up to about 1800 cfs. The day was nice and sunny and the rapids were great! We did chicken out of Devil's jump. We've done it before when the water was a little lower, but I think we could have easily run it again. However, the fear of injury or boat damage kept us to the portage trail. Maybe next time.

We decided to stay a night after getting off the water this year. It's always a long ride home the last day after paddling and picking up the cars. However, we didn't know that there is absolutely no place to get a beer around her on Sunday. Everyone we asked where we could get a beer said we'd have to drive about an hour. We're used to not being able to buy liquor on Sunday, but to not even be able to order one in a restaurant was a new one on us. The Kentucky side of BSF is a dry county so you can never get booze there. The Tennessee side isn't so bad, except on Sunday apparently. We ate at Pizza Hut and then went north to get out of the dry county and get a couple beers. Once on the road though we decided to head on home.