Rob began his commands as we entered our first rapid. Crammed into my tiny craft, layered in protective gear, and with the new earpiece and a microphone covering my face, I felt kind of like an astronaut blasting off into space, with Rob as my mission control: “Okay, Big E. You’re now entering the green tongue. At the bottom, there are some laterals we need to break through … now hard left. Fight the spin. Hold that line.” His voice was now fast with adrenaline. “Hard right … charge, charge, charge!”

Rob could now hang back farther from my boat, which lessened the threat of him T-boning me. Once I got stuck in an eddy, and Rob shot past me, but unlike Shoshone, he pulled over in an eddy a hundred feet down and talked me through. “Small left, small left … Now paddle hard … You’re through the eddy line. Hard left and hold that line.”

Despite the advantages, with technology came a higher chance of catastrophic failure. Water could seep into the control panel; a cable could disconnect; a microphone could be clogged with water; and a battery could die. I had to trust that the radio would work reliably. The pre-radio days had been more black-and-white: I could either hear Rob or I couldn’t. But with radios, the worst scenario would be for me to be hurtling down a rapid thinking everything was fine, when, in actuality, Rob was yelling desperate commands that I wasn’t hearing and following because I had no clue the radio wasn’t working.

On the flat water, I practiced my roll a lot. Radio waves don’t work underwater, so I couldn’t hear Rob when I was upside down, but as I rolled up, Rob would begin to speak. Most of the time, I’d hear him, but now and then, with no explanation we could determine, I wouldn’t hear a thing. When we checked, we’d find the radio had mysteriously shut itself off.

Our new system was a waterproof, voice-activated system, but we continued discovering some problems. First, the wind gusts and water splashes constantly triggered the voice activation. Since it was often activated, I couldn’t talk back to Rob. The big waves also knocked our mikes out of place, so Rob’s commands became a distant whisper. But worse than that, Rob’s first word would kick on the voice activation, and, because of that, it would often miss his first syllable. “Small left” became “—ll left” and “hard right” became “—rd right.”