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Show I Poor Weather Blamed for Drop In Cruise Participation Officials of the Canyon Can-yon Country River Marathon Ma-rathon Assn. reported this week that 392 boats registered for the annual an-nual Friendship Cruise down the Green River and up the Colorado. This was down about twenty boats from last year's count, directors said. One o f the primary reasons listed for the drop was the poor weather wea-ther on Friday and forecasts fore-casts which called for storm on Saturday and Sunday. Although several mishaps mis-haps were reported, the cruise officials stated that all problems winch required that boats be removed from the river were mechanical rather than problems originating originat-ing from the river. A total of 14 boats were removed from the water at Mineral Canyon because be-cause of malfunctions. This, cruise officials pointed out, is less than average. Two boats sunk at Anderson Bottom, but no one was injured. The first boat to sink at Anderson An-derson was not recovered, recover-ed, officials said. The second, however, was recovered after a clay bank gave way and the resulting silt sunk the craft. A third craft was swamped near the Moab Bridge when an unusually unusual-ly high wave hit the boat and sunk it. In all three cases, the occupants of the boats were uninjured. About thirty boats required re-quired assistance in getting get-ting up the Colorado River Ri-ver because of fuel shortages. shor-tages. These boats were unable to reach the Texas Tex-as Gulf boat dock prior to running out of gas. Rescue w orkers also had gasoline problems during dur-ing the cruise when several sev-eral barrels of high octane oc-tane fuel used by them was stolen from near the' Texas Gulf dock. Other incidents reported report-ed included two separate separ-ate families who were required to spend the nieht on the river be cause of difficulties. Both parties were assisted as-sisted bv CCRMA officials of-ficials after their problems prob-lems were made known. . Docking was slow this year due to a shortage "of manpower and the unusually un-usually muddy condition of the Moab dock. Some of these problems were also experienced at MGM bottom, where a number of boaters elected to leave the water. Cruise officials are presently working on plans to streamline the cruise for next year and to work out some problems pro-blems which occurred in the just-finished cruise. |