Maybe overloaded...?

At this point, my dad has prior obligations in Michigan, so my other uncle who we will call, “Wild Bill of the Wood” has come to take his place as galley slave on The Mermaid. This is probably going to be the most isolated and wild section of the river for the entire trip.  No roads in, no coverage of any kind, nothing but what you bring in and your own savvy! Well, with that perspective… we might have over packed.  You know, incase our savvy wasn’t up to snuff and we had to rely more on the what we brought part.  Yea… I have never seen the boat that low in the water.  We took anything we could imagine needing.  And with this crowd, we had some good imaginations! We are facing 150 miles of wilderness, wind, and gravel bars with the only thing to aid us is our own muscles!  No one has taken anything through this section but a canoe, kayak, or inflatable raft in the last seventy years!  (That statement probably is mostly accurate actually.) What happens right off the start…?  Yep.  We run aground! Ok, no big deal… we hop out, push the boat across the gravel bar… hope back in.  On our way!  Oops… run aground again…. Well that little scenario plays out about three times before we are even through town on our way into the breaks! Being captain of this little ship, I didn’t let the men know how concerned I was about this… but the crew might have been suspicious anyways.  We might have way overloaded this boat and now we are floating so low that we are facing 150 miles of dragging this thing over gravel and through muck…  We thought we were going to float the Missouri River, and instead we signed ourselves up for the Ididorad and we are the sled dogs! Fuck!!!!  Like seriously fuck.  We mutually come to the conclusion without mentioning it out loud that we should use the heaviest supplies first!  Normally on a voyage like this you use the fresh stuff first, things like eggs and hot dogs… (In my world fresh means things that need ice) but instead we decided to go with heavy canned goods to help the boat float higher!  So after spending the first day hopping in and out of the boat and pushing it over gravel bars… we drank most of our can goods!  (beer comes in cans, what were you imagining? dinty moore?) Anyways, with the boat floating noticeably higher the second morning, we haven’t had a problem running aground since!