Rolling down the Eel River rapids in Mendocino County

Gordon Lehman took to the Eel River rapids on a cloudy Saturday, with the storm-charged, olive-hued water rushing north through Mendocino County.

The veteran whitewater boater brought along his one-man Jack’s Cat, a 14-foot catamaran with two blue inflatable pontoons set three feet apart, separated by a steel conduit frame. It’s an agile craft that knifes through waves hit head-on, while side-striking waves will “flip you over like that,” said Lehman, a Sonoma County vineyard manager.

“Not today,” Lehman declared with a grin at the takeout spot on the Covelo Road about 14 miles east of Highway 101. Having successfully navigated the rushing water, he said, “I was very happy with today.”

So was Christina Woodworth-Powell of Sebastopol, a river guide for 27 years in California, Oregon and abroad who had never been on the Eel before. “It was great to be on a flowing river in the spring,” she said. “It was awesome.”

The winsome Eel River is a springtime favorite of North Bay boaters but a rare treat to catch at a favorable water level in decent weather. She and Lehman were among a loosely organized group that in late March tackled a stretch between Outlet Creek and Dos Rio, a readily accessible piece that is easy to run in three hours without stopping to scout any white knuckle rapids.

The Eel goes up and down like a Super Ball. An inch of rain adds 5,000 to 10,000 cfs. When a severe Pineapple Express dropped 22 inches of rain on the Eel River basin in two days in December, 1964, the river swelled to a monstrous 936,000 cfs, obliterating entire towns. The river also is dammed at Lake Pillsbury in Lake County and shrinks to a trickle by June.

To get on the Eel at its best, you need just the right amount of rain, ideally followed by a few dry days. At the beginning of March, the river had a meager flow of less than 300 cubic feet per second, barely enough for skinny little kayak. Two weeks later, the Eel peaked at 36,000 cubic feet per second after a heavy storm, nearly twice the advisable boating maximum.

By the time we arrived March 26, it had dwindled to a recreation-friendly 2,400 cfs - or?1 million gallons a minute. In just over four hours, 13 Eel devotees in six boats, including a handful of river guides, covered six miles beside the Covelo Road/Highway 162, traveling north from the confluence with Outlet Creek nearly to the confluence with the Middle Fork of the Eel at Dos Rios.

That run is an ideal day trip, less than two hours from Santa Rosa and closer to home than the popular South Fork of the American River in the El Dorado County foothills. It carries about 100,000 people every summer down 20 miles of Class III whitewater, 70 percent of them paying passengers on commercial trips.

There is, thankfully, scant commercial activity on the Eel because it is far from the Bay Area, with an unpredictable flow. You will typically have the river to yourself in winter and early spring, or share it with a few others, tucked in the shallow Eel River Canyon between a lightly-traveled rural road on one side and an abandoned railroad line on the other side, both up a short but steep embankment.

It feels like wild country. House-sized dark gray boulders line the verdant river banks and sometimes split the river, sprinkled with smaller rocks that create nine defined rapids, a Class III run in river parlance, meaning there are plenty of places to get stuck on a rock but not likely in any serious trouble.

In a blunt-nosed 14-foot inflatable raft like ours, built to bounce off rocks and ride through what boaters call “heavy water,” you’re pretty secure. Depending.

We put in on a broad gravel bar about eight miles from Highway 101, just past a bridge over the Eel River where Outlet Creek flows in from the left. No signs mark the spot, and all the gear gets carried down a few short slopes and across the bar to the water.

The run started innocuously, four of us in the boat with two dogs, including one that barked loudly when we bounced over waves. We got turned sideways in the first rapid, Tunnel 1, and took a cold wave over the side of the raft. It was harmless because boats bail themselves out through holes in the inflated floor, but it initiated Patrick Kennedy, an Irishman making his first-ever whitewater voyage. Helped him get over his nerves, he said later on dry land.

“I loved it,” he said. “I can’t wait to go back again.”

We stopped for a lazy lunch on the sand next to one of the small, crystal-clear waterfalls cascading into the Eel. The usual river chow - sandwiches, chips, fruit, cookies and beer - was accented by a jug of “Chateau Gordeaux,” a hearty cabernet Lehman made in his garage.

At mile 5.5, nearly to the takeout, the river swung left through a pinball array of rocks down to a formidable row of waves and a hole, a deep cleft in the water, at the bottom of the unnamed rapid.

“Stay right,” counseled Greg Israel, a Ukiah-based outfitter who knows the Eel like a good friend.

We took his advice. We stayed right, broke through the eddy line and floated safely past thundering waves.

Israel, with a paddle crew of four guides, powered through them. At 3,000 cfs, just a bit more water than we had, the waves could flip a raft, he said.

A half mile farther north, the tricky Last Rapid was washed out, covered by a blanket of smooth water. At lower water there is a slot at far left that is the only safe passage.

Israel, operations manager for Rubicon Adventures in Mendocino County, has run the Outlet Creek stretch more than 100 times, some years from November through May, and has seen it shape-shift with the flow. He rated our 2,400-cfs flow as optimal.

Below 1,000 cfs, it’s bony, meaning rock-riddled; up to 20,000 cfs, the torrent Israel ran during an El Niño year in the late 1990s, it’s still runnable, but Israel said he prefers the river no higher than 8,000 cfs, when most obstacles are covered. On that trip, 15-foot rafts were paddling waves 20 feet tall, he said.

A man named Andy fell out in a churning whitewater hole at a rapid called The Wall, named for a large cement retaining wall built to protect the railroad, and he swam the whole thing. They informally renamed the rapid “Andy’s Wall Hole,” after pop artist Andy Warhol.

The physically hardest part of rafting is usually the takeout, and here, within sight of the bridge over the river at Dos Rios, we hoofed everything uphill to an informal parking area off Covelo Road. The worst part was the 110-pound raft riding atop four people’s heads.

The Outlet Creek run is just one fragment of the 196-mile Eel River, which arises in the Mendocino National Forest mountains, makes a southerly loop into Lake County, then courses north through Mendocino and Humboldt counties, entering the Pacific Ocean near Eureka.

At Dos Rios, boaters can launch a 46-mile trip north through a stunning roadless, wilderness canyon, sprinkled with sandy beaches for overnight camping and five Class III rapids. It ends at the hamlet of Alderpoint, deep in Humboldt County pot cultivating country.

It’s a three- or four-day trip; Forestville-based Rubicon Adventures has a trip scheduled in late April and another in late May that likely will depend on more rain this spring. For information, go to rubiconadventures.com.

“Another glorious day on the Eel,” Israel said at the takeout on our Outlet trip. “There’s never a dull time on this water.”

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.