T
tonym
Foster dam to Albany will be super long!
Go with someone experienced your first time or two to get a hang of things. I can't recommend it enough. Crap happens quick and a nice float can go epically wrong in a second. Experienced boats go down every year on assorted rivers, but more often than not its the inexperienced boater running into dangerous situations.
Pontoons are a lot more forgiving then a drift boat though. It's best to float with another person anyways because of the shuttle situation. Good luck, if you decide to float the river. If the south santiam wasn't so far away id come up and float it with you.
started with an 8 ft pontoon. still shouldn't be floating solo without any experience in reading water and handling a boat in current. But that's my .02. People will do what they want.
Count on it taking you all day long. That is a long haul in a pontoon. Here's something to consider, the wind. It blows upstream in the afternoon. My wife and I paddled her tandem inflatable kayak from the Luckiamute bridge to Buena Vista about ten days ago. We intended to go to Independence but the wind was so strong we had to work like %%%% to get downstream in mid-afternoon and ended up aborting at Buena Vista because we didn't want to get there at midnight. I imagine a pontoon boat would be similar.