: What would you do?

I was sitting here at work doddling around reading stuff and I just remembered what I DID do when I spotted a small (~50-ft) tall water spout whipping up the water on the good old North Saskatchewan River: I tried to paddle into it. Sadly, the water spout dissipated before I could get into the spray it was kicking up. There never was any real danger since it was just a wee lad of a spout...I guess you could say that it was a "sprout of a spout". It occurred at the confluence of a creek that cuts from the east deeply through the high river bank to flow into the river from a westerly direction. Winds from the northwest were blowing hard and channeling through the ravine that day and mixed with winds coming from the northeast which funnelled through the deep river valley. When this happens the winds tend to accelerate as they are squeezed through the valley. We get some very interesting wind patterns because the river valley is so deep: sometimes they to blow in weird directions. That was also the day I saw several wind-generated three foot standing waves in a spot that is normally flat. I opted not to paddle upstream through the waves since I would have been stuck trying to run through them upstream and stayed in them rather longer than I would have liked. I wanted to run through them during my downstream run and play a little but when I returned, the winds had died down and the waves were gone, leaving the usual flat water.

Robert N Pruden