OCR Text |
Show Record that time, which was in the latter part of July. They started the raft with the boat. All of the equipment used in our drilling operations was taken down the river in one or the other of the rafts with the boat. All of the river in one or the other of the parts or in the boat. They had started out with those drill stems on the raft, but when they got hung up at the Lake Canyon Rapid, the drill stems were transferred from the raft to the 3147 boat. The equipment carried on these rafts weighed five tons. Continuing his direct examination, Mr. Bennett testified: Returning to our downstream trip when we were hung up on Shock Rapid, we unloaded our boat on an island at the lower end of the rapid and came back up to the rapid, tried to pry the raft off, and when we couldn't, unloaded its cargo into out boat and took that down to where we had left the freight that we had previously unloaded from our boat. It was getting dark, so we camped there for the night. Next morning we went back up and got our raft off which had been hung up on the bed rock at Shock Rapid. In getting the raft off at Shock Rapid it was necessary for us to get in the water and we found it about knee deep. Our raft had been hung up on rocks sticking out in that rapid. We worked the raft forward for quite a ways through there; there were probably stretches where it would float for fifteen or twenty feet and then hung up again, when we would pry it off and go on for maybe one hundred feet before again getting hung up. That stretch of water is probably one- eighth of a mile long, through the bad part. We also got hung up on a rock below Shock Rapid out in the middle of the river and were unable to touch bottom 3149 with an oar all the way around. This submerged rock stuck up and caught our raft and held us there. In November of that same year I made another trip upstream from Rincon to Bull Frog Rapid, a distance of about twenty- four miles. I believe it took us two days to make that trip because we stopped part of one afternoon to explore some old ruins. Going upstream it was the same prop- |