Day 17: Sauk Rapids

The plan today was two dam portages within the first 15 miles then continue on to Monticello, about 28 miles after the second dam.  We paddled 9 miles to the first dam, had another pretty long portage, and got back in our boats and paddled towards Sauk Rapids. 
I had read a little bit about these rapids, but nobody ever made that big of a deal about them.  They were barely even mentioned in most of the research I did.  The other guys we were with said they could be up to class 3, but I was still skeptic.  As we paddled closer, however, I could tell that they were indeed rapids and not "rapids" like everything else up to this point.  We slowed down to try and find the safest line (it would have been smarter to pull off to the side and scout them), but we really couldn't see too much.  The entire river looked pretty choppy.  The other three boats went ahead of us and all took different lines.  We sat back a bit and watched to see whose looked safer.  Josh was going through sideways, a big no-no, and had yet to flip so we figured we would be safe going down the right way.  The first section was big, we took on some water, but it wasn't overly scary.  I briefly worried about flipping since I didn't have any experience in rapids this big in a canoe, but I just focused on keeping us squared up to the waves and we were fine.  After this section though I looked to the right and there were more rapids.  Quite a bit bigger too.  We had no time to scout for the best line in this section.  We were already in it.  We skirted one wave, hit the brunt of another, took on more water, repeat.  Holes and waves were everywhere.  While trying to avoid one hole we would end up paddling straight for another.  At one point we were trying to get to the side of a pretty significant wave when Anders finally said, "We're not making it.  Square up!"  So we did.  Anders, sitting in the front of the canoe, described it as being thrust into a three foot wall of water.  After the front of the boat hit the wave it made its way to the back, lifting the front and slamming it down back into the water.  It was incredibly fun.  Also terrifying.  I would briefly think about our course of action if we were to capsize, but quickly realized I could only focus on keeping us squared up to the waves.  At least I knew all of our supplies (minus rain gear and few other small things) were securely strapped in.
At one point in this second section I scanned the water ahead of us to make sure Alex, Gus, and Josh were still upright.  I couldn't say for sure, but it looked like Josh had capsized and was swimming next to his canoe.  I said to Anders, "I think Josh is down!"
He yelled back, "I know, I told you that a minute ago!"
It was too loud.  I didn't even hear him.
With the adrenaline coursing through us we hit wave after wave and continued to take on water.  No matter how hard we paddled we couldn't get completely out of most the waves.  We skirted a lot and hit the brunt of a lot but we finally made it out into calmer water.  We were in calmer water, however we were still not in the clear.  We had about 6-8 inches of water in the canoe adding weight and making it extremely unstable.  My first reaction was to get to shore as quickly as possible to bail all the water out, but Josh had capsized and all of his gear was slowly floating away.  We grabbed one of his bags which had to weigh 60 pounds since it was soaking wet and paddled it closer to shore.  Anders had to just hold on to it.  It was too heavy to lift into the boat and I was afraid if we tried it would flip us.  We dropped it off next to Alex who slowly nudged it all the way to shore and went back out into the middle of the river to gather more stuff.  Gus had picked up Josh's paddles already.  He put them in our canoe and set out to grab more stuff as well.  We picked up water bottles, sunscreen, bug spray, tires to the portage cart, etc.  Gus continued on to a boat landing across the river while Anders and I went back to shore so we could give Josh his paddles.  Anders stayed and used our water pump to slowly rid the canoe of it's newfound weight while I walked along the shoreline to bring Josh some of his things.
Eventually we all made it to the landing Gus was at to return all of Josh's gear and talk about how incredibly fun, nerve racking, and adrenaline pumping the rapids were.  Also how lucky we were that we were all together.  While going through the rapids we at least knew that if we flipped we had help on the other side.  That made the situation a lot less intimidating.  If we weren't there Josh still would have his boat and he would have made it to shore just fine, but there's a pretty good chance a lot of his gear would be dam fodder three miles later.  His trip would have taken a major setback.  Luckily, his biggest loss of the day was his cell phone.
Shortly after the rapid excitement we had another portage.  At this point we said our goodbyes to Josh, Gus, and Alex.  They were going to try and track down a phone for Josh and get some food.  We still had the goal of making it to Monticello so we could make it to the Twin Cities the next day.  We gave Gus our numbers and set off.  It was fun paddling with other people.  Hopefully we'll meet back up down the river.
We ended up making it to Monticello a little before 8:00.  There was another campsite seven miles downriver that we decided we could make before dark so we grabbed some Dominos and got back on the water.  We kicked out those seven miles in 50 minutes.  We paddled hard.  We set up camp, scarfed down our pizzas, and passed out.  Hard.