My husband and I took our 12-year-old daughter and her two friends on a tubing trip with Webb Brothers recently and ended up in a very scary, sketchy situation when one of the girls got stranded in the rushing water standing against a partially submerged tree trunk after her tube got sucked up under the tree and separated from her. Then when we went to rescue her (three of us were linked up at the time) the water behaved unpredictably and our daughter and her tube almost went under, too. It's very hard to steer in a tube. Without that tree it would have been a reasonable adventure for a Class II + river, but the tree made things extremely hazardous for our group.
The business has you sign a standard liability release form before renting the equipment, but I believe that a good lawyer might be able to convince a judge and jury otherwise, were some kind of tragedy to result from one of these tubing outings. Especially considering some of the comments that were made by the driver of the truck who hauled us to the put-in. There had been a delay after we signed up, and when he finally had us and the other folks loaded on the truck with our equipment he rushed through the instructions which were hard to hear from where we were standing on the back of the crowded truck bed. He did try to warn us about the infamous white pine tree and the "strainer" effect, even saying he would stop the truck en route so we could see it. But when we got there the people in the back of the truck were like, "I can't see it." We didn't have a good idea where the tree was, but in the tubes, even if we had known where to expect the tree, we were almost completely at the mercy of where the waters wanted to take us, especially the girls whose hands barely reached the water to do even a little bit of paddling. My husband had insisted on taking a paddle, although the guy from the business and others tried to discourage him, saying it would be useless. In fact we were very glad to have the paddle with us.
Some more details: In his talk the guy from Webb Brothers told us that they'd tried for 15 years to get a couple of governmental agencies to come and remove the tree. His assessment was that "[The tree] really needs to be gone." He tried to blame some kayakers for their risky choice in going over the tree the previous day. And the very last thing he said to us before driving away from the put-in was to say that HE wouldn't go down the river in a tube, that there was no control. He knew it wasn't a good idea to go down that river with those girls in tubes, and he set us up for it anyway. I trusted in the Webb Brothers website where it said the tubing was acceptable for persons 12 and up. If I had known beforehand about the specific risks on this section of the river, I would have chosen rafting or kayaking instead.
My advice to the business is to stop telling people that minors can safely go down that part of Hiwassee river in tubes. And if you can't get the government to do something about the tree, do it yourself. Some day you are going to get sued out of existence if someone gets sucked under that tree and drowns. I am fairly athletic, we had the paddle to steer with, and we had some lucky breaks that helped us get free from the situation intact, but it could have gone much worse for us that day.
There are some positives I could say about our experience as well, but this one scary incident completely overshadowed the rest. As my daughter stated afterwards, "I'm never doing THAT again." read more