With all the extra time my grandad has had since he retired he has wrote up some of the stories he heard in his younger days. Here is one of them, please tell him what you think.
Quote:On March 1, 1989, Harry Whittaker and I went fishing at Lost Creek
Reservoir. We caught our limits but this expedition came near to being a
tragedy.
We
pulled Harry’s 12 ft. boat on it’s trailer and put in at the ramp on the East
side of the Reservoir. This was late in the morning I think, a chilly, cloudy day, but calm enough; the boat had a
small canvas top, just enough to keep us out of the bad weather About an hour later we were trolling under
the Payton bridge headed upstream. The
boat was powered by a 712 HP (I think) outboard, and also had a battery
operated trolling motor. We kept going upstream until we about ran out of water, several miles I think, and
fishing was slow. Finally we shut off
the gas and let the boat drift back downstream until we had several feet of the
bright clear water under us. It was
misting a little with occasional light rain showers.
The
fishing picked up and we were busy for awhile,
most of the time being busy just untangling the lines. Harry was a klutz, but very calm about it all, and little by
little we added the fish to the fishbox, hardly noticing that one by one the
few other fishermen who were in the area had pulled out. The weather was lowering and the misting
turned into snow flurries, and when the rain showers turned into snow showers
about four
o’clock we decided to head on downriver.
We
cranked up the outboard but for some reason we could not get it out of
reverse. Some thing had jammed! Try as we might we could not get the boat to
go forward, so we gave up and headed downstream in reverse, at about three
miles per hour. In the meanwhile the
snow got serious, as in just a short time we had two and three inches of snow
in the boat, and the daylight was dimming away.
After
what seemed like two or three eternities
we ran out of gas, and
daylight. We hooked up the battery to
the trolling motor and nosed downstream
again. Fortunately the snow was
thick enough on the sloping river banks so they reflected the last dredge of
daylight so we were able to navigate somewhat.
Also the snow would quit now and then giving us some relief Pretty soon though the battery
started to lose its energy and little by little we went slower and slower. From time to time we scraped one bank or
another and poled ourselves off and did
some one oar paddling to keep us moving.
We finally admitted it-we were cold, wet and miserable, and lost.
But
we were still moving.
At
about 8
o’clock we could see the skeleton of the bridge ahead
of us, highlighted every once in awhile
when a passing motorist, or truck would drive across. We pulled up to the West bank, directly under the
bridge and tried to get out of the boat with a rope to latch on to
something. All the somethings were
covered with eight inches of snow, but we finally kicked around enough to
expose a rock to tie up to. About then,
Harry stepped off the boat into a couple feet of cold water. He got back into the boat which we pushed
sideways to the bank so he could get out easier, which he did do, but as soon
as he got two feet under him he slipped again and fell face down into the snow. We had been to this same place in the
summertime and knew there was a path up the steep hillside to the road up
above, so we kicked around for awhile and found what looked like the shallow
opening we were looking for. We would go
for awhile and then wait until another car came by to give us a few seconds of
light so we could try to pick the next section of the climb. A lot of this climb was on all fours, climb a
little, slip a little, climb some more.
It probably took us about an hour to climb up to the road, and we were
thankful at last to get onto the flat of the road. The snowplow
had already been through which
made it much easier going. We had
decided we were going to walk to Prospect, about eight miles I think.
A
little while later a car came down the road . Southbound and we were too tired
even to wave at them. A little later a
Northbound pickup came by; the driver stopped and asked us if we wanted a ride.
Such a question!
This
Good Samaratin, [[Larry Loftus, PO Box
29, Prospect, OR. 97536 --560-3691] was a Forest
Service Employee who took us to his trailer home in Prospect. We were close to
hypothermia, Harry moreso than I, as one of Harry’s legs was soaked up to his
hip from that stepoff into the water down at the boat. Harry phoned his son, Bruce, who, after an
hour or so, drove up to Prospect through the snowstorm and using some magical
sense of direction found the trailer house we were in. He took us to his own home near Eagle Point,
dried us out and tucked us in for the
night After he got home with us, Bruce
phoned the Sheriff to call off the hunt posse which already was forming to find
us, and we phoned Ethel, his mother, and
also Nelle.
The
next day we went down with Bruce in his Ba10:49PM 1/13/95ss boat, found the boat intact, and
pulled it back to the landing and then home. We cleaned the fish, untangled the
lines, and got ready to go fishing again.
Just
another day, almost. End of Story