The Boat Trip

One day in early August, 2003, I returned home and found a message from Foster Harness on the answering machine.  This was a little strange since, though I knew him, I didn’t know him well.

I returned his call and exchanged pleasantries and then he asked if I would be interested in making a boat trip down the Arkansas River.  I instantly replied “Yes!”, since I had thought about doing just that for years.  As it turned out, he had been planning this trip for over a year and had done quite a bit of research on the trip.  He wanted to leave from the park just east of Broken Arrow, Oklahoma on 71^st Street, go through every lock on the Arkansas River and get clear to the Mississippi.

I went to Foster’s house and we sat down and began making plans.  He would take his 25 ft. pontoon boat with a 130 hp Honda outboard and I would take my 19 ft. center console boat with a 125 hp Mercury.  Two of his sons and a friend were going with him and I told him I would find one other person to ride in my boat.  We planned to leave on September 6 and return on September 13 or 14, figuring that it would take eight or nine days to make the round trip.

I starting making plans including testing the boat for fuel consumption, finding a passenger, and making a list of provisions which would be needed.  Although I did not think he would be interested, I called my brother, Gary, and asked if he wanted to go.  Without hesitating, he said, “Count me in”.  During the next couple of weeks, he started helping me with the provisions and planning.

I hadn’t really planned on more than two people in my boat but Gary called one day and told me that he had mentioned the trip to his son-in-law, Bill Schaum, and Bill wanted to go also.  Who was I to say “No”?  Because Bill had a background in retail food, having managed several McDonald’s franchises during the past ten years, he took over the food planning.

We took the boat out and ran it one day over a known course to see what kind of fuel mileage I got.  I ran right at 4 miles per gallon, about normal for a boat of this kind.  I knew it wouldn’t do this good on the trip because it would be loaded to the gunnels with gear but I didn’t know what to expect.  It had a 34 gallon fuel tank, giving me a range of about 120 miles but I wound up taking extra cans totaling 30 gallons anyway.

With about two weeks to go, we had not found anyone else to go with us and we really would like to have had four or five boats on the journey.  Foster and I decided a little publicity wouldn’t hurt so we went down to the local newspaper office and talked them into running a story and picture.  In the story, we stated that we were looking for other people to accompany us.  It didn’t do much good – we didn’t get anyone else to go - but everyone in Mannford knew about the trip.  Meantime, one of Foster’s sons and his friend backed out, leaving just Foster and his son, Mike, on the pontoon boat.

Finally, the appointed day, September 6, came and we met at Bluff Landing Park at 6 am.  Foster’s daughter met us there and saw us off with Krispy Kreme donuts and coffee.  My son, Dan, drove us out there and took the truck home so we would not have to leave it there all week.  At dawn, we idled out of the park in our boats and headed down river!

Our Boat

Foster's Pontoon Boat

For the first couple of hundred feet, the water was full of debris and we had to idle through it.  I wasn’t getting a warm, fuzzy feeling about this.  However, we went through the first lock right at the park, and after getting out of it, we were home free.

Between Tulsa and the Mississippi River, there are seventeen locks and dams on the Navigation Channel and we planned to go through every one of them twice, once going and once returning.  We almost made that goal but more about that later.

The scenery on the trip was beautiful.  We spent most of each day motoring down the channel, looking at the views and trying to stay even with Foster.  His pontoon boat would max out at about 23 to 24 mph, while my boat would start to fall off plane at about that same speed.  Because of this, we couldn’t run down the channel side by side so I would run way ahead of him, and wait until he caught us.  After he had passed us and gone almost out of sight, we would start up again.  Each one of these “cycles” took about 30 minutes.

We quickly learned that the time you make on the river is largely dependent on how you catch the locks.  We had marine radios in the boats so we would radio ahead to each lock when we were about two miles out.  If they had no other activity going on, they would be ready for us when we got there and it would take about 20 minutes to get through the lock.  If there was a barge tow ahead of us, especially if it was a really long one, it could take as long as three hours for us to get our turn.  Pleasure craft, after all, are last in line at the locks.

The first day we made pretty good time and got to near Ozark, Arkansas.  We found a sandy beach and pulled up on it to make camp.  All of our plans about cooking food quickly went out the window and we resorted to the vienna sausage and pork and beans diet.  After this wonderful meal, we went to bed.  The first night I tried to sleep in the bottom of the boat and it was miserable.  The space almost didn’t allow me to roll over, which I like to do.  However, we did survive it and headed off the next morning, Sunday, toward the waiting Mississippi.

We didn’t fare nearly as well on Sunday with the lock situation and only made it as far as Little Rock before night began to close in.  In fact, we did have to wait three hours at one lock on Sunday because of a double length barge tow and then had to wait over an hour at our fueling stop for the fuel attendant to show.  Fuel continued to be a constant concern and we weren’t about to skip any places to buy gasoline.

When we got to Little Rock, we found a little cove just off the main river channel and tied up there.  I had decided that I was not going to spend another night sleeping on the boat, but there was no place on shore to sleep except in the middle of a poison ivy patch.  I opted for the boat again.  Gary said he was not going to sleep there so he took his sleeping bat and went up over the hill.

Once again, the sleep situation was miserable and I felt claustrophobic where I was lying.  Finally morning came and Gary came staggering down the hill.  I asked how his night had gone and he said “just fine but I did get a surprise when I woke up!”  I asked him what the surprise was and he said that when he woke up and looked around, he was sleeping just off the green on the 13^th hole of a golf course!

Monday, the third day, we began to have much better luck with locks and dams than we had the previous day and we began to sense that, with a little luck, we might be able to reach the Mississippi today.  Also, we found a Corps of Engineers Park on the river that had showers and we got to take our first showers of the trip.

We did get a bit of a surprise when we got to the Pendleton Bridge, near Dumas, Arkansas.  The marina where we had planned to fuel up was out of business!  We knew that we didn’t have enough gasoline to get to the Mississippi River, turn around and go clear back to Pine Bluff, where we had last bought fuel.  Fortunately, we talked a fisherman into taking all of our portable cans up to a Convenience Store and filling them up.  This did set us back about 45 minutes, however.

Finally, at 6:00 p.m. on Monday, we pulled out into the Mississippi River at Mile 590.  The current in the Arkansas River Navigation Channel had been about 2 mph; the current in the Mississippi was over 7 mph!  You could sure tell the difference.  We pulled across the Mississippi and got out of the boats just to be able to say we had been there.  Since it was going to be dark in about an hour, we had to head back upstream to a camping site we had selected.

On the way back upstream, Bill spotted a black bear and pointed it out to us.  It had come down to the bank of the river and was just standing there watching us.  As soon as I turned the boat around to go back and get a better view, the bear vanished.

After going through two locks going back upstream it was almost totally dark when we got to the park we had decided on.  Instead of being able to look for a good camping spot, we decided to just tie up at the courtesy dock next to a boat ramp for the night.  I was not going to spend another night on the boat so I took my sleeping bag and made a bed on the dock.

We had not been bothered by mosquitoes up to this point but they were thick this night.  Fortunately, I was able to douse myself in insect repellent and avoid getting bit.  For a while, however, the buzzing of these critters was enough to keep me from sleeping.

Tuesday morning, we got up and prepared to leave.  We had been cautioned to take an extra propeller with us and I found out why this morning.  I was trying to back out of the little cove we were in and hit something underwater.  It messed the prop up good but we got the spare on quickly.

We once again headed upstream, knowing that we were considerably ahead of our original schedule.  Like a bunch of stupid men, however, we approached the whole trip like it was a race!  The next time, I’ll slow down and take my time.

We got back into Little Rock about 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday and decided to have the first decent meal we had had during the trip.  There was a place called “Gator’s” on the river and we went in there, body odor and all.  I swear, this was the best meal I had had in years.  After we ate, we quickly got up to the Little Rock Yacht Club where we bought fuel and started looking for a place to camp.

Tuesday night was the best night of the trip for sleeping.  We found a sand bar off the main channel of the river and threw our sleeping bags out on it.  That sand really felt good.

Wednesday was another good day as far as timing the locks went.  We seemed to get through each one of them almost immediately.  We knew we were making good time and toward the end of the day on Wednesday, we knew that we could get home the next day, arriving back a full two days ahead of plan.  We also knew that the weather had been perfect for five days and was going to change on Thursday.  We had had five days of full sunshine and little wind, something unusual for Arkansas and Oklahoma.

Finally, at about 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, we got through Kerr Lock and Dam near Sallisaw.  Our last fuel stop was at Applegate Marina on Kerr and we knew they would be closed.  We also knew that we couldn’t get all the way home without adding fuel, so we decided to spend the night on Applegate’s dock, get fuel the next morning, and head out.

When we woke the next morning at 6:30, the wind was howling and the sky was gray.  Gary, Bill, and I talked it over and decided that it was not important to us to be able to say that we went all the way back to Tulsa.  We decided that we would call my son, Dan, and have him meet us at Three Rivers Landing in Muskogee.  We told Foster and his son about our plan but they wanted to go ahead and go all the way back to Tulsa.

Since our boat was not going to go all the way back, we knew we had enough fuel to get to Three Rivers so we took off, leaving Foster and Mike to wait on gasoline.  The trip across Kerr was absolutely frightening!  The waves were running three to four feet and that was really too much for our boat.  We were pounded like you wouldn’t believe but it still had not started to rain.

We finally got across Kerr to Gore Landing, just below Webbers Falls Lock and Dam.  We called in to the Lock on the radio but were advised that a barge tow had just gotten there and it was going to be about two hours before we could get through.  By this point, we were all about through boating so we decided to call Dan and have him come on down to Gore City Park and pick us up there.

We pulled over there to wait on Dan and while we were waiting, Bill and I walked up to a small café in Gore.  We got three great big breakfasts to go and took them back to the boat.  Again, this was awfully good eating!

Finally, Dan got there with the boat trailer and we got the boat loaded just as it started to rain.  We headed back toward Tulsa and it began to pour.  We were all glad that we had decided to “chicken out” at Gore.

Later, when we talked to Foster, he told us that the trip across Webbers Falls was just as hair-raising as Kerr had been.  On top of that, he and Mike got drenched in the rain.  Because the visibility was so poor, he got out of the channel at one point and hit a submerged rock.  He knew he had done some damage but he kept going.

He later found out that he had ruined his prop, bent the prop shaft in the motor, and knocked the skag, or bottom fin, off of it.  The total damages amounted to about $1400 but Foster was so happy about the trip that he didn’t even mind it.

When we got back, Gary and I agreed that we had said about everything that we had to say to each other for a while.  After all, we had spent six days in the boat with each other.  We decided that, when we saw each other at Mom’s house or somewhere else, we would just nod at each other.

The trip was one of those events where, when you finish it, your first reaction is that you would never do it again.  Then, about a week later, you start making plans to do it the next year.  Oh well, we’ll wait and see!

[Footnote: Nine months later, Gary passed away of a massive heart attack.  I was so thankful that I had gotten to spend this time on the water with him.  Also, I did make the river trip again, this time with my son, Dan.]