From the Captain's Journal:        

River Date 23-24  (29 -30 July 2008)

The Bear Naked pushed off of New Madrid of a more then perfect evening and little did they know the 29^th would go from being the most beautiful day to the most terrifying ordeal of our lives. We were floating on a calm star lit evening and not a barge in sight. Well after floating a while the bugs began to buzz and we thought it best to anchor down for the night. We motored over to what looked like a calm spot along the shore. Nate dropped the anchor and it kept dropping and dropping until it suddenly caught and anchored on what we are sure was a wing dam. For those of you who don’t know what these are, they are underwater dams made of large rocks that help keep the water moving cast out in the main channel for the large barges. They are all up and down the river banks where they have problems keeping the channel deep enough. Anyways the anchor caught this and that’s when we found ourselves up a big river without a paddle. The water began to rush past the boat at a scary speed. We tried to use the motor to run up on the anchor to pull it loose. This didn’t work because the motor didn’t have enough power to fight this strong current. Then a little bit of water came up over the bow. So Dave ran to the back to try and get his weight to lift the bow up. The bow came back up and Nate thought it would be wise to cut the anchor but then the boat seemed fine so he thought maybe we can salvage the situation. WRONG!! All of the sudden the bow started to plane into the water. A huge swarm of water rushed over the bow and began to flood into the cabin. Nate yelled to Dave “I need a knife, get me a knife, we have to cut it”. We scramble for a knife and found a commercial meat knife. Nate ran to the bow that was now completely under water, the steering wheel could not be seen. The water was about three foot high inside the cabin at this point, and rising quickly. We had about 20 seconds before the boat would be completely sunk. Nate went in head first over the bow to cut the anchor free but couldn’t find it. God was watching out though. The bolt tied to the anchor bent open and released the anchor and the boat bobbed back up to the surface. We floated down a bit and collected what we could that had gone overboard. We tied off on a shore and walked about 5 miles to a farm house where a football coach, Al, let us make a phone call and gave us a ride back. The next day the crew spent the whole day on a sand bar drying everything out. There a kind man and new friend of the crew washed the crews musty wet clothes and passed the time with them.