Paddler rolls the videotape

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For most of the morning, Corey Welsh has been paddling his Necky Vibe kayak down the West Branch of the Penobscot River – sometimes ahead of, but often well behind the rafters he is paid to keep track of.

Three days a week, Welsh works in Belfast. He does carpentry. He mows lawns. He gets by. And three other days a week, he works for the New England Outdoor Center. He paddles. He plays. He has fun.

And he gets paid for it.

Welsh is what’s known in the rafting trade as a “video boater,” though his responsibilities are more varied than that. Yes, he carries the camcorder. Yes, he edits the tape, puts it to music, and hopes the resulting product will be so powerful … or funny … or breathtaking … that they just have to buy one.

But over the course of a day, the 21-year-old Dover-Foxcroft native does far more than that.

That’s why, come lunchtime, he’s scurrying around the campground at Abol Ledges, dumping bag after bag after bag of rice into an enormous skillet he and a friend call “BFP.”

That’s Big Frying Pan … and believe this: Your kitchen isn’t large enough to hold the implement that can cook enough rice for 30 or more hungry rafters.

“As you can see, this is an exact science,” Welsh says with a chuckle as he liberally douses the rice with the contents of an economy-sized bottle of soy sauce.

Come lunchtime, Welsh trades in the camera, bellies up to a roaring fire, and becomes the camp cook. If he’s lucky, a small piece of chicken will stick to the grill and break off from the breast it’s attached to … at that point, it’s fair game for snacking. Until then? Well, he’s got to keep cooking.

Rafters are coming. And they’ll be hungry.

There are plenty of interesting summer jobs in the Maine woods. Many offer unique opportunities to enjoy the state’s wilderness, or to spend every day engaging in pursuits that visitors spend their hard-earned cash to try … just once.

With that said, Welsh figures he’s got it pretty good. He’s accomplished with a camera, but better with a kayak. And it’s the paddling that got him into this business to begin with.

“It feels weird to go back to the real world [during the week],” says Welsh, who works on the river on weekends. “Down in Belfast, it’s absolutely gorgeous. It’s a beautiful place. But I’m up on a roof with a nail gun, putting shingles in.”

Up here, 25 miles or so northwest of Millinocket on one of Maine’s wildest rivers, he does nothing of the sort.

Up here, he shoots some video … cooks some lunch … and (most importantly) he paddles.

The New England Outdoor Center trips begin midway down the river, then rafters are bused back to McKay Power Station to run the technically demanding Ripogenus Gorge. Shortly after their day begins, they reach Nesowadnehunk Falls, and their first real challenge.

Welsh, of course, is already there, camera at the ready. He stands on a rock, aims, and captures the action as the three rafts first conquer the rapid, then take turns heading back into the turbulent water and playing in the flow.

And when they leave … Welsh stays.

These are rapids, after all. He’s a paddler. He knows exactly how much time he has to get to the next position to film … and how much time he has to play in the waves.

Matt Polstein, the owner of New England Outdoor Center, wants his workers to have fun, Welsh points out.

“Matt basically gives me free reign,” Welsh says. “He says [the video] has got to be G-rated, which is absolutely acceptable and normal. But [he says] ‘Have a good time. Go nuts.’ As long as I’m doing my job, lunch is ready, and I don’t have the guides waiting for me for half an hour because I’m out there surfing, playing, then we don’t have any problems at all.”

And that doesn’t happen. Welsh’s day is well choreographed. He knows how long he can play. He knows how long it will take to cook the chicken. And he knows, for instance, that when he paddles through the Troublemaker deadwater, he ought to hear the company’s shuttle bus driving by on the nearby road. If he does? He’s right on schedule.

The videotaping is his foremost concern … though, to the paddlers, lunch may take top billing.

He stows the small camera in a watertight box, packs it into his boat, then does his best to keep himself (and the camera) dry while negotiating a series of Class IV and V rapids.

“I’ve come close to swimming, but I haven’t swum with the camera,” Welsh says, repeating an industry buzzword that describes what a paddler turns into if things go bad on a particularly mean stretch of water. “There’s a mental block when you’re paddling with a $1,000 camera. You say, ‘I can’t swim today.'”

The rafting business, as you might guess, enjoys its own colorful lexicon that guides and video boaters use to describe the varied mishaps that can occur when a large, floating object is tossed around by nasty, unforgiving rapids in a big, mean river.

Rafters are paddlers when they’re in the boat, for instance. When they are tossed into the raging river … well, they become something else altogether.

They become (as you may have guessed) swimmers.

And if you happen to fall out of your raft in the wild, raging water of the Staircase rapid? You’re in trouble.

“That’s what we call ‘The Varsity Swim,'” Welsh says with a chuckle. “It’s the big swim. It’s the worst swim on the river that commonly occurs.”

If a paddler becomes a varsity swimmer halfway through the rapid, there isn’t much to do, Welsh points out. Tossing “throw bags” to the swimmer is dangerous in shallow, rocky water, because ropes can become trapped on an underwater rock.

“It’s best to let everybody flush and get ’em back into the raft then,” Welsh says.

Flush?

You bet.

“That’s generally not in the brochure,” he says. “But that’s what happens. Everybody flushes down river.”

Sometimes, however, throw bags are in order. And on weekends, when big trips are the norm, a boat can upset with plenty of help on both sides of the river.

The scene gets a little hectic, Welsh says.

“When a boat flips and you’ve got five boats on either side of the river you see everybody start chucking their throw bags,” Welsh says. “We call that ‘rapid floss.’ All those bags are coming into the middle [of the river] and they’re all reeling people in. You strain out the big chunks that are floating down.”

Those big chunks? Well, you might be one of them.

In case you’re wondering, let me assure you that Welsh and the New England Outdoor Center aren’t laughing at their clients. They’re laughing with them.

The company strives to provide a safe, fun ride down the river, and guides try to keep paddlers from becoming swimmers. Welsh says the company is known as “conservative” in the industry. Other companies may offer a rougher ride, in general, and service a different clientele.

“We run a really safe trip and try not to crash at all, but it happens,” Welsh says. “[We do] sell more videos when rafts flip. They say, ‘Look at what my raft did. That’s me swimming down the rapids!’

“Carnage definitely helps the video,” he adds with another laugh. “It makes it more fun to watch.”

After spending the last four years on the West Branch, Welsh knows the river well. He knows which lines he has to take to get to his filming positions. He knows exactly how many paddle strokes it will take him to get through particularly testy rapids … and even knows whether his last paddle stroke has to be with his left or right paddle blade.

And he knows when guides are in trouble. Even if the guides aren’t quite sure.

“Between myself and the bus drivers, we usually know when the guides are gonna crash before they know it,” he says. “You see enough people coming down through the same way, when that guy’s a little bit different … it makes it fun to watch.”

Three days a week, Welsh is back in “the real world.” Three more, he’s here. In the woods. On the water. Playing. Working. Having fun.

“I like it here a lot,” he says. “It’s where I grew up. It’s what I know. It makes it easy to stay.”

The lucky winners have been drawn for our “Win a Deep Sea Fishing Trip contest,” and I’m happy to report that Jeff Whitten of Enfield and Rosalie Chase of Clinton will be joining us on John Dittmar’s Vagabond on Aug. 16 for a fun day of fishing off Southwest Harbor.

Each winner (and a guest of their choice) will make the trip with me, Dittmar and plenty of other paying anglers.

Congratulations to the winners.

John Holyoke can be reached at jholyoke@bangordailynews.net or by calling 990-8214 or 1-800-310-8600.