Crossing the Columbia

We've talked about doing it. We've thought about doing it. We decided to do it and now we've done it! My friend Scott and I swim a couple times a week in the Columbia River between the docks in Howard Amon Park in Richland. We've been doing it for 3 years or so (during the warmer months). We've also heard about the "Columbia Crossing" event in early September each year. I think we've both had thoughts that it would be a good challenge to try it with the "because its there" reasoning. A few weeks ago, the official Columbia Crossing was on September 5. That morning, Scott and I were swimming and I mentioned that the Columbia Crossing was that day. He talked about how he wanted to do that and was sorry he missed it, I felt the same way so we formulated a plan to do our own crossing a few weeks down the road. We picked a date and decided we needed someone with a boat to escort us. Some other friends of ours, Kevin and Lou agreed to paddle beside us in their two-man kayaks. We picked Saturday, September 20. I thought that would be a kind of momentous date since it was the day after I turned 45. We kept swimming in preparation and got ourselves psyched up. I got myself some new swim goggles, a swim cap and even a new tube (we always swim in the river towing a tube behind us, just in case there are problems).

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Well, Saturday morning came and Denise announced it was pouring rain as she went outside for the paper route. I just hoped the others involved in the swim would still be game. As I ate my breakfast, the other participants showed up, ready to go! We headed for the landing spot and dropped off vehicles then to Chiawana park for launch. We remembered that there was a professional bass fishing tournament going on that morning. We were going to be in the water at 6:30 a.m. but that was the start of the tourney when all the boats race up or down the river to their favorite fishing spot to try and catch the big ones. So, we delayed our launch a little and by 6:45 the last boat went by and we were off! I prefer a breast stroke while Scott sticks mainly to the crawl. The water temperature was about 60 degrees but we quickly got our hearts pumping to build up our own heat. I wasn't sure how long it would take us to cross but the Columbia Crossing participants took anywhere from 29 minutes to an hour. I took the GPS and transferred our course to Google Earth for the satellite picture you see here. We each pulled our tubes (mine also had 3 flashing LED halloween pumpkins for added visability thanks to my wonderful wife!). It was kind of amazing how the weather cooperated. When we started out, we had showers and a head wind from the south with tiny rollers, I swallowed plenty of water but soon, the rain let up and the water smoothed. As we swam from the park toward the middle, we could see the bottom of the river about 12 feet down. About half way across, you can see we go upstream of an island. The underwater extension of the island is quite shallow and we had seaweed brushing across our bellies as we tried to swim right on the surface to avoid getting tangled. After we passed the island, the river got much deeper and we couldn't see the bottom. We ended up getting across in 35 minutes covering the same course as the Columbia Crossing so we felt pretty good about how we did! Denise and Justin were there to greet us and take pictures (Justin found a monster crawdad to play with). A successful day!