Thursday, March 28, 2024

Scout Troop No. 68 floats the river the Huck Finn way

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The guys in Boy Scout Troop No. 68 are committed Scouts but kind of busy. So they needed a project.

"We needed something to teach us how to work together," said Garrett Argo, a freshman at Bridgeport High School, who's part of the troop. There were options-a hike, a campout, something like that, but the Scouts took their cue from the big river right outside the door. "We came up with a rafting trip. Because it had to have little or no cost," Garrett said. Garrett, Randy Udell, a senior in Bridgeport, and Greg Brown, a Bridgeport junior, decided to float the Columbia River from Bridgeport Marina Park to the boat launch in Brewster.

Now there are plenty of rafts out there, rafts to rent or-since it had to be a low-cost trip-borrow. But that's hardly the Boy Scout way. They built their own.

The Scouts went out and scrounged among their families and friends. They went with a design featuring barrels inside a platform made of scrap wood bolted together. They could've gone looking for a design but they didn't; "we just kind of winged it," said Scoutmaster Marc Armstrong, Pateros. "High tech planning there," said Garrett's dad Jim.

"My grandpa (Don Baker) had the wood," Garrett said. Armstrong provided the barrels, and they bought the bolts that held everything together from Randy's uncle Steve Baughman, who works at Bridgeport True Value. They added a tarp for shade, and "we nailed a lawn chair to it, too," Garrett said. Armstrong estimated the total cost was around $10. "So it was pretty cheap entertainment," he said.

Construction proceeded in fits and starts; these are busy guys. But slowly it took shape in the field next to the Argo residence, and by September 20 it was ready for launch. The raft was transported to Marina Park and backed into the water.

Was there any concern it would sink? "Some," Garrett said

Parents, brothers and sisters, friends, even people staying in the park gathered at the boat launch for the moment of truth. ("They had way too many people giving input at the launch site," said Garrett's mom Jolene. Armstrong finally had to explain that it was the guys' project, and would people let them launch it?)

But when it finally hit the water it floated just fine. "It floated pretty good. It was fairly stable and it didn't sink," Armstrong said. (The Scouts put air in the barrels to increase the buoyancy. It weighed "1900 and some pounds with all the air that was in those barrels," Garrett said.) In fact it was so buoyant there was more concern it might tip over from being top-heavy. Actually "it came close a couple times," Garrett said. But it stayed upright. They had a crew, James Gehring and Sherman Mumpower, riding shotgun in a boat. It was all set up to be a great day on the river.

There was just one glitch. "We got out there in the middle of the river and we were going, like, two miles an hour," Garrett said. The river was low, really low, and the current was slow, really slow. "It took us an hour to get to the fish hatchery-no, it took us two hours to get to the fish hatchery," Garrett said. They were going so slow that the guys in the support boat ended up going in circles around them. At that speed it would've taken a couple of days to get to Brewster. They asked their support crew for a tow.

It was a fun trip nonetheless. They saw "water weeds. (And) a sandbar that we got stuck on," Garrett said. "We ate oatmeal cookies." But there were sights to see-the river was alive with birds. "There was a whole sandbar covered with pelicans," Garrett said, and they saw a heron and other water birds along the shore. Alas, nobody had a camera; nobody wanted to risk dropping it in the river.

Actually only one person fell out-that was Garrett. (Everybody wore life jackets, so he just got a little wet.) He fell in a second time, he said, as they approached the dock in Brewster. Their tow boat cast them loose and they were paddling for shore, and Garrett's paddle broke. "It was a plastic paddle and it broke in two," he said, and he went back in the drink, briefly.

The Scouts kept the raft intact after the trip. "Our plan for the raft now is to take it up to my grandparents," where there's a pond, Garrett said.

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