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Since I had pre filled all the tubes in Nashua (and Dave was nice enough to bring eight of them up the night before in his pick-up truck, another three I tied to a bike rack on my car, and Peter had a couple of tubes of his own) I had planned to have us launch by 11 am. But between getting things ready for launch and traffic in downtown Conway (for dropping vehicles off at the exit point) we didn't launch the tubes until just about noon.
I
had predicted our 5.8 mile ride down river would take six hours this year.
This was based on it taking eight hours in 1999 when we went on a day where
the average flow rate for the day was 234 cubic feet per second (CFS),
and from tracking the flow rate for a couple weeks up until Friday night
that the flow rate would be between 300 and 320 CFS. The lead group
of tubes it turned out reached the exit point in only five hours sharp!
With us slow pokes taking an extra half hour. Checking on-line when
I got home later that night it turned out the flow rate peaked at about
520 mid-day! This year only a couple of us had to pick up and carry
up tubes at one location because we had gone down the shallow side of an
island/sandbar. The rapids were great and plentiful!
We also lucked out with the weather. We were still getting a few sprinkles on the windshield on the way back to the launch site after we dropped the rest of the vehicles at the exit point. But we didn't see any more rain drops after that. There was a lot of cloud cover so it could have been sunnier, but enough Sun still peaked through that I got a sun burn (and I had a good base tan a month and a half ago). I should have headed my own warning about putting on sun block!
See the photos (note: I didn't take my camera on the water. Alison had a waterproof camera and promised she'll be scanning them in and sending them to me at some point in the future). By the way, that link is to preview size versions of the photos. If you'd like me to email you the full resolution (2048 x 1536) jpeg(s) of any of them let me know which ones.
Thanks all!
