Bad Dog - Dead Dog gone bad

Dead Dog Hole - at the state line of ID/WA - has been morphing on and off the past 2 weeks from the normal, consistent, reliable hole that is easy to paddle back up to, into a wave that's hard to paddle back up to once the flow gets above 17,200. The feature becomes a green wave on surfer's left and a nice, breaking wave in the middle and on surfer's right. The breaking wave section is really fun once you get to it. 

 I've seen the morph last 5 to 15 seconds to an hour and more recently for the last couple days.  Thursday night at 17,200 if you paddled like a ninja you could attain the wave with about a 90% success rate.  Friday I was alone there at 17,800 and was successful about 50% of the time, wearing myself out in the process.  As such, I thought it was time to make an eddy in the north channel .....so I did.  With a 60 ft rope attached to the east/most upriver bridge support it made a fairly easy job of getting back up to the wave. You have to pull on the rope maybe 7 feet while keeping your right edge up slightly.  I got the eddy done just in time - quite a few people showed up as I finished (Mike B, Drew, Pres. Gordon, Brain J., Jonah, Nick, Will and a few others I recognize but don't know their names).  If you go to Dead Dog just be careful and don't pull up on the eddy rocks, they may fall off the eddy wall.  

I left a rope (The Bad Dog leash!) up this afternoon - 5/9/09 - for everyone to use.  It got stolen Monday, so here's the deal;

the last boater there please coil the rope up when you're done and stash it in the secret hiding place (like we've done for three years at Trailer Park);

looking upriver from the dirt slide note the ponderosa pine. On the river side of the tree there's a bunch of exposed roots,  stash the rope under the roots and cover with a few pine needles.  

Here's what the Bad Dog looks like from the bridge:

Then, I put my cell phone/video cam in a Pelican dry box and attached that to a remote control submarine to take a look at what's going on under the wave.  Here's what I found:

Here's some photos: