As part of my adventure through Kansas City, Dave had organized a super badass trip to kayak down the Missouri River with me and our mutual friend, Dawn. He had actually done a shorter version of the trip before on a canoe with his brother and niece, but this particular trip was a three and a half hour tour in kayaks. While I wouldn't have thought it would be super difficult, I know that my arms and shoulders were sore for two days following and it definitely puts a toll on your back too, so it was a lot harder than I'd have thought.
 From left to right: Dawn, Dave, me
The Missouri River is enormous for one; at certain places it has to be a few hundred yards wide. The trip started with the river moving pretty slow, but it would certainly pick up at various places. There are never really rapids in it, per se, but there are parts where it turns pretty hard and creates powerful eddies on the surface. One of those would eventually get me.
While the river itself is enough to contend with, there is also boat traffic as well as barge traffic. There are old graineries, strip mines, and power plants along the way, so it's very much setup to accommodate enormous commercial and industrial traffic.
When we were about two hours into the float I decided to tackle one of the “rapids”. Getting through the water itself was fine, but as I merged back towards the steady flow of the current, I wound up getting swept into a giant eddy. I didn't have any problem with it spinning me backwards and then twirling me around a little bit, but the force of it turned me so quickly that it threw off the balance of the kayak and eventually turned me over into the water. Both Dave and Dawn were too far downstream to immediately do anything about it. Of course I was also the only of us not to be wearing his life-jacket (it was extremely uncomfortable wearing it while also squeezed into the tiny compartment of the kayak).
 Shortly after having tipped over twice in the kayak and now soaking wet (which felt pretty wonderful in the hot Missouri sun)
Given that I had our wallets, keys, and other valuables in my dry bag, my first priority was to make sure that didn't sink. It didn't, but I've never owned a dry bag before and so I wasn't sure if it would or not. Once I had that in my hand, I donned my life-jacket from within the water as I was being pulled downstream and started working to flip my kayak back over. I quickly succeeded and started to climb back into it. Unaware of just how much water it had taken on when it flipped, it immediately flipped over again given how unstable it was. It wasn't until that moment that I realized I had a real problem. I was stuck about 100 yards from the shore in a river swirling with eddies and unable to gain any control of my kayak. I finally managed to flip it over again, place all of my belongings inside of it, and very carefully balance myself on top of it while I slowly paddled orthogonal to the current towards the muddy shoreline. It wasn't over once I got there.
The shoreline was an almost immediate drop off and so it was not particularly easy to pull the boat onto the shore (though I was lucky this particular part of the river even had a shoreline at all). Once I eventually got it up there I had to flip it upside down and then lift it from side to side in order to evacuate all of the water from it. When I finally accomplished that, I fixed myself snugly inside of it from the shore and then started throwing my body weight forward to slowly push it back into the water (noting again that even a few feet from the shore was way over my head since it's a dredged river).
Thankfully Dawn had come back to ensure that I was okay while Dave was just too far downstream to fight the current. It was actually a lot more comfortable in the boat once I was soaking wet and when I eventually caught back up and re-formed our little kayak trio, we had a good laugh. At me, not with me.
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