DROWN AND OUT IN A DAVY CROCKETT B-MOVIE…

Ultimately, the BBC classed me as a whitewater rafting expert on progs like Excess Baggage... Expert? I managed not to die, that's all!

 I’ve just had the most fun it’s possible to have whilst drowning.

White water rafting is for crazy people … and, you know what, it should be compulsory for everybody to go crazy at least once in their lives.

When I first arrived at the camp near the ancient town of Castellane in Provence I was convinced I must be mad anyway …   I’m nervous about places that openly brag about karaoke evenings, theme nights and table tennis.

So, I kept reminding myself that Cannes is actually only just around the corner, in a country mile sort of a way.

 Very Riviera, dear.

And so is the sun terrace overlooking the fishing pond where I went for my first glass of champagne of the afternoon.

By  mid-evening and two bottle of champagne I felt adventurous enough to get up and give a rousing chorus of Agadoo doo doo with my fellow sailors who’d adopted an almost gallows attitude to the rigours of the next morning..

… the Verdon River.

 There were a couple of journalists on a freebie and two florid middle-aged Floridans who claimed to be whitewater rafting their way around the world ... they began three months ago, they said, on the Broad French River in North Carolina, had skimmed through Porto Rico, shot through the rapids of Wales and Scotland and were now plunging their way through Europe.

 Well, that's Americans for you.

After a brief briefing that basically consisted of hang on no matter what, we pushed off in to the cool Vardon in a dinghy that groaned and undulated more than the river itself.

As we sailed down the rapids backwards, sideways, upside down, in the boat, out the boat, my attention was drawn to  an eagle that flew as silent as plane with a rabbit in its claws.

But it was that split second’s lack of concentration that nearly drowned me … the dinghy skimmed round a rock, leaped to the left and dumped me into the river to the right

          Well, as Verdon took me, all I  knew was that it didn’t matter any longer whether I could     swim or not, I was rolling and tumbling beneath the waves, devoured by the current that miraculously slid me safely through the rocks.

And as the river turned me and began to choke me with my own hair, I remembered what the group’s captain   said - lay your  head on the pillows of the water and refuse to struggle.

My body skimmed across a rock and I shot into a syphonic alley as if I was an eel. The shale turned into smoke as I shimmied through it.

 I finally broke the surface like a maniac, thrashing my arms around and coughing and splashing and for that split second I was back amongst the living I couldn’t tell if the looks on the faces of my companions were of horror or hysterical laughter.

… But then I was gone again beneath the surface.

I  was jettisoned over a waterfall and crashed feet-first in to the next natural lock  of white water. I grabbed a slice of breath before the surface closed over me as tightly as the whale closed over Jonah.

Now, there is a natural corkscrew in a fast-flowing river – and that corkscrew with the conspiring of the rocks can knock you inside out, crack your skull and disembowel you all at once. But I’d been taught well and allowed myself to glide as if I was riding the edge of the air.

And I survived. They found me perched on a rock … the dinghy shuddered and jerked as my colleagues helped me back in. And yep, they’d been laughing all along – while it had been a journey of discovery and trauma for me, to them it had been a big  joke that actually lasted less than 30 seconds.

But it was like a right of passage … I knew how Davy Crockett must have felt in all those 1950s B movies

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