History

May 28, 2021
By Michael McAleer

How it started

It was March 4th, 2018 when I first laid my precious 1990 Bianchi Equinox on the bow of a $40 pool float.

The bike used to be my dad’s, and is the same one he rode when I first started joining him on longer rides at the age of 8. The raft had come in the mail a week earlier, bought on discount from a sketchy warehouse of old, leftover inventory. I may have been placing some outsized trust in those vinyl seams, sure. But I’d had this idea in my head for a while and my buddies clearly needed me to prove it was possible before they’d subject their own bikes to the same dodgy endeavor.

I pedaled the 15 miles of dirt roads to the river thinking only about how adventurous I was. How daring! How epic! I was a modern-day Edmund Hillary! All the world over, people were spending this Sunday lazing about the house or mowing the lawn or whatever, and here I was pioneering a new sport. Chappeau!

I spent close to an hour at crystal clear Telford Spring, meticulously arranging and re-arranging my bike on the raft; checking and re-checking my knots. When I climbed into the raft myself, I was only about 60% certain it wouldn’t sink or explode. I eased in like a fat man testing a hammock. But it seemed to float just fine, and I very cautiously paddled out of the spring into the great, wide body of the Suwannee River. It was then that I learned something truly profound:

This was not epic.

At least, not in the sense I had thought it would be. I was not Indiana Jones, dodging alligators while expertly navigating my little raft through rapids and defending my precious bike from abounding exigencies.

I was tubing down a lazy river, with my bike for company. We were two silent passengers reclining on a slow, peaceful water. I needed a straw hat and a fruity rum drink. And I realized for the first time what I had done. I had discovered a way to strip away any and all seriousness from a summer afternoon. This was silly and relaxing, and nothing else at all. I was hooked.

How it’s going

It took less convincing to get my buddies on board once I’d proven the concept on my own, but it wasn’t automatic. Only Scott and Alex had gotten rafts and were game to play along. We rode the dirt roads around the town of High Springs and floated the Santa Fe River, stopping to swim in the many freshwater springs along the way. We drank beers and ate sandwiches while we floated. When members of the drunk tubing crowd at Ginnie Springs asked where we were headed, we pointed stiffly downriver á la Steve Zissou and shouted “To the OCEAN!”

In truth, we got off the river about a mile after the tubers did, and rode 20 or so miles of dirt roads back to High Springs half-buzzed and fully happy. Scott and Alex were sold.

It’s been just over three years since my inaugural test run in 2018, and there are now at least a dozen of us “riffrafters.” Some of the boats wear several patches to seal their battle scars, but these little $40 pool floats have given us more joy than their makers could’ve possibly intended.

If you’ve read this far, do yourself a favor. Click on the gear tab above to see just how little you need to have this much fun yourself.

Cheers!
– Michael