bout 1969 or ‘70, I decided that the way of the future was a little bit faster boat through the Canyon. So I got talkin' to Don Harris and Bill Belknap and a couple of others about the possibility of runnin' a power boat through, because they had done it before. They kinda thought it was a neat idea, just for an expedition, but they didn't really think it was too good an idea to be takin' passengers down. But I disagreed, and ended up puttin' together about a 27-foot fiberglass jet boat.
The early history of it was it had made the first documented successful upstream run in Cataract Canyon a few years before that. The guy that had done it, John Newland—I don't know that he had a whole lot of interest in river running, but it was just something to do—a “guts and glory” thing. He called the boat the Rapid Eater #4, and after runnin' the river a couple of times up Cataract, he just parked the boat out in his back yard and it kinda weathered away.
Well, I bought it from him and completely stripped it out and rebuilt it. He had two 425-horsepower Ford engines in it, with Berkeley jet drives in it, and I didn't think that I needed that much—couldn't carry that much fuel. So I built it up with a single engine, tested it out up on Utah Lake, and loaded it up with all my friends and everything, and it seemed to do pretty well, so we set it up to bring it down the Canyon here.

How big was your boat?

About 27 feet by about 9 feet wide, and a little over 3 feet high on the side. It was basically a flat bottom craft with a flaring “scow nose” at the bow for climbin' waves. All in all it was a pretty big boat. Funny, though, the first rapids we got to the old Venture seemed to shrink to the size of a bathtub.

Do you know what it weighed?

It was heavy—nearly as much as that cataract boat. (laughter) I have no idea how much it weighed. It was pretty heavy.
I got a permit from the Park Service and we started out, I think it was in July, on a five-day run to Temple Bar. There were seven of us—a family of three I'd taken on a raft trip, a couple friends from Salt Lake, and a Cross Tours boatman—Gordon McCoard. We started out, everything was real good, had a lot of attention up there at the Ferry. One little problem we had, was despite all the testing I'd done earlier with a full load of people and food and gas and everything else, I couldn't get the old tub up on a plane. But I figured, “I'll burn off a little fuel, and eat a little food, and in a day or so it'll be just fine.”

Drink a little beer?

[chuckles] Yeah. So anyway, we took off, and sure enough, about the first day out, things started pickin' up pretty well, and we were zippin' down the river and havin' a good time. We were running on about 12 to 15,000 cfs, and except for the cruddy water, everything was great. I got down to Hance Rapid and there was a lot of driftwood floating in the river—it had been flooding a little bit—and tryin' to avoid it and everything. I hadn't had a real lot of trouble with it. It was pluggin' off my cooling system a little bit and I had to fix that a time or two. But as I entered Hance Rapid, just making a standard motorboat run across there, I sucked up a big chunk of driftwood into the impeller intake, and the engine was still runnin', everything was still going, but I lost about 75 percent of my power. I was still able to cut across the river okay, and make the right run, but I got a little bit too far left on the tail end of the rapid, and there was a big wave down there, and I tried to dodge back around it, but I couldn't quite make it, and I hit it on a 45 degree angle and put about a couple hundred gallons of water over the bow—which was no big deal, except it knocked my windshields out. [several chuckle]
Gordon ducked down when he saw the wave coming, and the window on his side smacked him alongside the head and split his ear just a little bit. He wasn't hurt too bad. My window hit the steering wheel and cracked in half and slid back on my arm and I cut my arm pretty good. When I looked in that cut I swear I could see my kneecap. I tossed the broken glass on the floor and kept on goin'.
The engine went out. I don't know quite why it went out, but anyway, I was dead in the water and couldn't get it started again. We jumped up on the bow with a couple of paddles and worked it over into a back-eddy and got everything dried out and got my arm fixed up a little bit so that we could get goin' again.
There was a kayaking party just behind us, and I figured they'd be through pretty quick, and so we waited for them to come down. They had a doctor along. I waved them in, and they came over, and I told them that I'd cut my arm a little bit, and the doctor looked at it and he said, “Yeah, you did. I'd get that taken care of as quick as you can.” I said, “Well, I was really hopin' that you could give me a bullet to bite on and you could maybe sew it up for me.” He said, “Oh, I wouldn't dare touch it out here. Maybe in the office, but not out here.” And I said, “Well, thanks a whole lot.”
Now unknown to me another hard hull power trip had put in on the river the day after I did. Jimmy Jordan and Jim Rowland from Boulder City with two small outboard rigs—it was sure a surprise to see them come around the corner. Jordan had clipped a boulder in Hance and had cracked the stern of his boat. When he came down off plane it started fillin' with water—he gunned it across the river and rammed it up on a sand bar to keep it from sinkin'. They had no repair kit so I gave them my fiberglass repair material so they could fix it.
Anyway, we bundled things up and headed on down the river to Phantom. Took the tops off of the coolers, which were also seats, and blocked off the windshield frame so that any more water wouldn't come in. We had a pretty good run from there on down to Phantom Ranch.
My arm was in a sling, I couldn't move it real well, but I had a fellow from Jim Rowland's boat sittin' behind me, hangin' onto my belt, so that I could kinda operate the throttle a little bit and still steer with my left hand. We got down to Phantom, and then we all helicoptered out to get sewed up. I decided with the problem I had there, that I'd cut the trip off. It was just kind of an experimental trip, and I think some of the folks were relieved it was over. So anyway, we ended the trip there and everybody went their way.
I wasn't real sure about what had happened with the driftwood in the impeller, and I thought maybe I had had some damage in the drive system. So I ordered some parts in, and it was gonna take a few days to get them in. As luck would have it, my brother-in-law was on a rubber boat trip down with Cross Tours, and he'd been doing a little work on the floorboards of his boat at Phantom and had a gas can fall off on his hand and smashed it pretty good, so he had to go out to the hospital. So I decided, “Well, I'm gonna give my arm a chance to recuperate a bit.”
The next morning I hiked back down the trail and—it's amazin' how fast rumors get going—several of the people I met on the trail told me about a big jet boat that had exploded on the river and that people were all scattered up and down the Canyon. Another old fellow told me about someone who was skiin' behind it through a rapid when it blew and it ripped his arm off. Even back at Lees Ferry later boatmen told me they'd heard I'd lost my arm.
So I took the rubber boat trip down—left my boat parked there at Phantom Ranch—and went on down the river with the rubber boat trip. When that was over, I went back to the South Rim where I had some parts for the jet drive delivered in, and hiked back down into Phantom with one of Cross Tours' mechanics, Sam Scott, and rebuilt the jet drive down there and then took off.
Well, I'd had both the original engines rebuilt, and they were supposed to be built to blueprint specifications for dependability. I don't remember exactly what rapid it was—goin' down below Phantom, it was a good time, we ran everything just fine, didn't have any big problem with it—but I was cutting out across the tail of a little small riffle, and all of a sudden a rod let loose in the engine, and it blew a hole through the side of the engine, so I was shut down there. We paddled over to shore again, and evaluated the situation, and it was obvious that I couldn't repair the engine there, so we put out a fire signal and wrote some letters in the sand for a chopper. We were right on the flight line going into the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, and there were planes flying over about every fifteen minutes, but at that point they were all looking at the end of the runway, and not down in the Canyon. It took us about two days to finally signal somebody, and they dropped down in the Canyon and flew over us, and pretty soon a helicopter came down and picked us up. We hadn't thought about it but there was no place for them to land, so we signalled to them to drop a ladder. They did and I told Sam to get aboard. He didn't like it much but he climbed up—about 10 feet—into the chopper. But when I got on the ladder, the pilot swung out over the river and started climbin'—talk about pucker factor!
We went to the South Rim and I chartered a flight home and got a spare engine, turned around and came back down, put it on a rubber boat trip that was leaving. [laughter] Then I went back down to the South Rim and bummed a ride with, I think Ron Smith, down at Phantom, to take me down to where my boat was, and I spent a few days pullin' that engine out, so that the new one comin' in, we could just set it right in place. When the other party got down there, we switched engines and I just decided I was gonna take it easy and float out with them.
Again, it just seemed like everything that was possible to go wrong with that outfit mechanically, did. I went through fuel pumps, I went through alternators, I went through starting motors. I mean, you go a million miles in a car and never have the trouble I had down there with that. It was just Murphy taking over, I guess, because everything was supposed to be new when I started out.
So we took off—and I was by myself at this point—and tried to catch up with the rubber boat party that dropped the engine off. I still had seats for windows so to see ahead I would stand up on the dashboard, hang onto the windshield and steer with my foot.

They got a little bit ahead of me and I was goin' down through Kanab Creek Rapid and somethin' started soundin' a little bit funny on the engine, and I turned around, and there was smoke comin' out of the (chuckles) engine compartment. It turned out that I split an oil filter. For some reason, there was too much pressure I guess. But anyway, blew all the oil out of the engine and it was in the bilge. I couldn't shut down until I got out of the rapid. Then I just kinda drifted until I got down to Olo Canyon, and pulled in down there. By that time, the engine was startin' to rattle just a little bit from lack of oil. [laughter] I didn't have any more oil to put in it, so I sat there at Olo Canyon for, oh, maybe two or three days, and every river party that'd come by, I'd flag ‘em in and ask ‘em if they had a spare can of oil. Most of the guys didn't, because they'd pre-oiled their gas up above. I even tried refining the oil in the bilge by filtering it and boiling off the water. That didn't work out too well. But I finally bummed enough oil to pretty much fill the engine back up again, and took off again down the river.
This time I made it down below Havasu, and I had a rod that started knocking a little bit. That was caused by the oil failure. I decided that I'd better pull over and get some parts back in, so that I could fix the engine, because if the engine blew up, then I was gonna do the same thing that Hudson did [with the Esmeralda] and just shove it out in the current and let it go, because I was gonna be dead in the water at that time.
I sent a message out with a Fort Lee group to my wife at home to pick up a certain number of parts—I figured all I really needed was some bearings and a few minor things—and to have her take ‘em down to St. George and put ‘em on a charter flight in a rubber bag that had plenty of flotation, and fly out to where I was at and drop it in the river. Then I'd swim out and get it, take it in, and fix my boat and be on my way. [laughter] So I sat down underneath a ledge, down below Havasu for about three or four days, and I was waitin'. Any noise I heard, I figured that was the plane, but nothing ever came. I lived pretty good down there, though—every boating party comin' down the river, they'd kinda heard the saga of the adventure [laughter] and they thought that I was destitute or nuts or something, but anyway, they'd pass off pretty good steaks, a couple of six-packs here and there. I mean, I decided that, “Heck, I'm just gonna stay here! I'm livin' better down here than I was at home.” [laughter]
I'd been sleepin' on my boat until one night when it rained a little—I moved up under a ledge. That's probably the only lucky thing that happened on that trip, because a rockfall came down and hit the seat I'd been sleepin' on.
So anyway, a reasonble time passed, and my brother came down on a river trip, and he didn't know anything about bringin' any spare parts in, so then I figured that the message hadn't got out. I had started the trip with a 20-horse Merc that I used as a spare engine, hooked on a trolling bracket, just for emergencies. But one of the Quist boys had come by earlier, upstream. He had some trouble, and so I let him borrow my spare engine. When my brother got down there, I just decided, “Well, I'm goin' outta here one way or another.” So we put a 20-horse motor on the back of that big ol' tub, and away we went. The bracket was so far down on the stern to let the motor reach the water that I had to stand on the jet pump outside the stern of the boat. I had to zigzag back and forth to see where I was going.
We got down to Lava Falls, and I still had.... I had taken the spark plug out of the cylinder that was knocking, and the engine would still run, but it wasn't running on eight cylinders. I figured, “Well, maybe we could conjure up enough power here to get down through Lava,” which we did. I was gonna run it just like a rubber boat also. I'd heard that Jimmy Jordan, after he'd left me at Phantom, had gone through Lava Falls and swamped it and lost their whole outfit down there. It had washed ashore down near Whitmore and they'd burned it. So that didn't make me feel real good.
Anyway, we took off, and, you know, made the standard rubber boat run down through there again. The boat that I had was real buoyant and comin' down that little burble line, [I] figured on just dodgin' in behind the big old lava rock, and then cutting from right to left through the rapid, back it off on the throttle and just givin' it a little gas when I needed it, enough to clear the big boulder down at the bottom. The little wave that comes off of that lava rock up above the rapid pushed me clear out, almost to the middle of the hole. So I fired the old beast up and took it around, way over to the right. By the time I got headed back left again, I was almost in the rocks on the right-hand side. My brother decided he was gonna ride with me on that run, so I told him, “Just hang on, ‘cause we're not gonna back off of anything. We're just gonna kick it in the rear end and go.” So we went down through the rapid and I think about twice in there we became airborne comin' off of those big waves. But as luck would have it, we made it out of the bottom. The engine was really soundin' pretty bad by that time, so we shut it down so that I'd have a little power in the Lower Canyon if I needed it, put the old 20-horse back on, and away we went again.
So anyway, I couldn't get the engine fired up down in the lower Granite Gorge, to run those rapids, so I perched out on the stern of that old tub, hangin' onto the 20-horse, and tryin' to hang on and keep from falling off. [laughter] Anyway, we eased it out of the bottom there, and finally, having left on a real good five-day trip, thirty-two days later I pulled it out at Temple Bar, but it was still floatin'. [laughter]
As far as I know, it was the last hard-hulled powerboat that ever went through the Canyon, and I think it was the biggest one, but I'm not 100 percent sure of that. When I was en route down the Canyon, I decided that the length of the boat was not right. I'd go over one wave and through the next one, so I was gonna shorten the thing up a little bit, or shorten up any future boats that I'd put together.
The Park Service had given me a special use permit, just like any of the other outfitters, but the next year when it came time to renew, they sent a letter of regret saying that they didn't think they wanted that kind of a boat in the Canyon. [laughter] I can't imagine why. But it was a good experience, anyway.

Did you try to uprun much when you were comin' down?

Well, I did a little bit. It'd go up everything just fine—everything that I tried. I didn't try any of the real big rapids, but one interesting little sidebar here: I came down past Deer Creek and one of our rubber boat trips was parked there, and they waved to me, and so I decided to go back up and talk to ‘em. [I] came down through the rapid—I didn't see ‘em until I was in the rapid—and then I came down and into this little riffle down here, and decided to turn around and go back up through and give everybody a show. I got in this riffle and started to turn around. I figured if I couldn't get all the way around, I'd just do a “Y” turn—back up, and come on up. And I got a little rock or something stuck in the reverse mechanism on the jet drive, and I couldn't get it in reverse, and I was going crosswise to the river, and I couldn't get the thing to completely turn around. I was headin' right for the rocks on the shore, and there was nothin' I could do. I just backed off on the throttle, and figured, “Oh, man, I'm gonna sink this thing right now.” And I hit the rocks on the shore—some pretty good ones like that—a big ol' thick fiberglass hull, and she rode up on the rocks. I took a quick look under the deck to see if I could see any daylight shinin' through [chuckles] and it looked dark and didn't look like I'd torn anything up too bad, so I jumped over the side real quick and pushed the boat back into the water. The stern swung down and so I went on back up through the rapid, pretty slow, so that the nose was up out of the water, and put it up on the beach up there and checked it all out. Everything was okay, just took a little bit of paint off of it. It was a tough old bird.

What happened to it, do you still have it?

Well, it's a sad story. [laughter] I left the river running business and moved on to Houston, Texas, and left it parked at a friend's place. My brother was starting out in the diving business, and he was training some divers to do salvage work, and so he called me up. I'd stripped out all the mechanical stuff there and was gonna rebuild it, but I never did get around to it. Anyway, it was just a hull, and he asked me if he could get ahold of it and use it as a training aid to train salvage divers how to lift a sunken boat. So I gave it to him, and I don't know what he did with it after that.
About a year ago somebody told me that there was an old sea plane sitting up at an airport at Bountiful, Utah, up north of Salt Lake, and I went out there to look at it—I was interested in a sea plane. And as I was driving home on a back road, I could see a big old orange boat. This boat was painted bright international orange, and I see this big old orange boat parked out in a chicken coop or something, out behind this house. And I stopped and backed up. The name of my company was Venture Expeditions, and I had Venture painted on the side of this boat, and I'll be danged if the old Venture wasn't sittin' out under a chicken coop. [laughter] So I stopped there and talked to the people that owned the house, and it belonged to, at that time, this old lady's son. He'd got it from my brother, and he'd built a big old goofy lookin' cabin on it, and somehow or another—I don't know for what reason—but he cut the transom out of it and built a big well up inside to put an outboard motor in. And then it didn't work very well, so he just parked it out there in the field, and to this day, that's where it sits, I guess. [laughs]
Kind of a sad demise. I should have just shoved it off out here and let it have a Viking burial.