Dart...
To the wild-and-crazy crowds who jumped into their water crafts this summer for a float down the Red Deer River with little regard for their lives and the trouble they cause other people.
It truly is amazing that with the growing popularity of river floats, and growing ignorance among those taking up these outings, that officials haven’t started fishing out bodies.
But sadly, it is likely to happen eventually.
Ignorance is in abundance on a popular stretch of the river from the Penhold bridge to Great Chief Park in Red Deer — a stretch of almost 30 km.
Advocate outdoor columnist Bob Scammell devoted Thursday’s column to the “idiots” he’s encountered while floating down the river and fly fishing for brown trout from a reliable boat.
Recently, he and fishing pal Dwayne Schafers encountered a group of five young adults floating down the river in an unsuitable dollar-store inflatable Scammell dubbed “a rubbery ducky;” it was meant only for a swimming pool.
The hearty crew asked how long until they reached Three-Mile Bend? When told that they could be looking at around nine hours from between the Penhold bridge launch to just below Three Mile Bend, one of the crew members claimed they were told it would be only a two-hour pleasant float.
By then the once-happy crew was feeling the bite of the cold waters. Eventually they were forced to take refuge on the shore while Scammell and Schafers watched.
He wrote: “It was a pitiful scene: three young men in Ts and baggy shorts and two females in bikinis, both hypothermic, one sobbing and shivering uncontrollably, the other hunched over and spasming so hard she had to be helped up the bank for the retreat” to a near riverside house.
This is not an isolated incident on the river.
Anyone who respects the power of nature in all its unpredictable glory would raise a red flag over lengthy river floats. Even if the river treats floaters well, the weather can turn at any moment.
Scammell urges everyone to practise caution during the September long weekend. Prospective river floaters would do well to heed his warning.
Dart...
And to the hundreds of Red Deer River floaters this year who display a wanton disregard for the health of this precious river by reducing it to a dumpsite.
Canoeists report that between the Penhold bridge launch site and the Great Chief Park launch, the shorelines are tangled with abandoned inflatables, picnic garbage, human feces, toilet paper, diapers and empty beer cans.
And that’s just what’s observed on the surface.
Every year a volunteer cleanup crew launches canoes and walks the river banks at the end of the floating season, to pick up what’s left behind in and along the river.
Intoxication is rampant on these river trips.
The water bed is littered with junk — beer cans, liquor bottles and whatever else the drunken sailors choose to pitch overboard.
For the sake of the health of the fragile river, and those idiots gambling with their lives, it’s time to establish regular wildlife officer patrols and put restrictions on river floaters.
Wildlife officers tour the river banks checking anglers for fishing licences, while drunken idiots float by causing more damage to a fisheries habitat than somebody illegally catching a walleye from shore.
The Red Deer River can no longer be degraded as a free-for-all playground.
Strict guidelines are in order and laws must be enforced. Most important, a patrol boat must be employed to carry out those tasks.
Rick Zemanek is an Advocate editor.