VIDEO/PHOTOS: Authorities say a 911 call from a person living at a homeless encampment along the Willamette river alerted authorities about a kayaker struggling against the current near Willamette Falls on Saturday night. “As the call taker was on the phone with the reporting party, they were describing him paddling and struggling, and then describing him going over the falls,” said Sgt. Nate Thompson with Clackamas County Sheriff’s Office.
Thompson said that, as of Monday, the search for the 20-year-old missing kayaker from California has only yielded his empty blue kayak, seven and a half miles downstream at Elk Rock Island. “Just before going over the falls, the male actually jumped out of the kayak, attempted to swim,” Thompson said. “They witnessed the kayak go over the falls, and then they witnessed the male go over the falls. After that, there was no other sightings.”
He said the kayaker likely did not know about the falls when he put in around 10 p.m. from a floating home community, where he was vacationing with his family less than a mile upstream from the falls. “To our knowledge, so far in talking with the family, no, he was a very inexperienced kayaker. Maybe been on a kayak a couple of times in a lake, and not an experienced kayaker as far as, like, river kayaking. We don’t know exactly why he went out at that time and why he went out so late at night. They had just gotten to this area and they were very unfamiliar with the area,” Thompson said.
