Father, son conquer America’s mightiest rivers

ALBANY — Dave Krantz is in Argentina right now, on a dove hunt where the birds are as thick as flies. The trip is Krantz’s way of recovering from a recent 915-mile, five-day trip he and his son, Mike, made on their jon boat covering the length of the Ohio River.

In a couple of months, Dave Krantz will turn 80.

The Krantz men — Mike is 58 — have been traversing the nation’s major rivers for more than 40 years, filled with the wanderlust that struck Dave as something of an east Tennessee River Rat growing up on the Holston River. When life — and fate — brought the Krantzes to Greenville, Miss., hard by the mighty Mississippi River, the Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn in Dave Krantz called out to him.

And he responded.

“Yeah, I lived that Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn life growing up, always duck hunting, fishing, doing things on the river, that was me,” said Dave Krantz, who lives now in a lovely northwest Albany home with his even more lovely wife Peggy. “Living in Greenville, I spent what free time I had hunting and fishing on the Mississippi, and I started studying it. And I got to thinking what it might be like to take a boat from the source of the Mississippi in Minneapolis, Minn., down to New Orleans, where the Mississippi runs into the Gulf (of Mexico).

“The more I talked about it, the more it became something I wanted to do.”

About 1978, the opportunity presented itself, so Krantz started what has become a semiregular odyssey for himself and his older son, who shared his father’s passion for all things outdoors. Then 38, Krantz and 16-year-old Mike rode their 14-foot jon boat from New Orleans up to Greenville, a butt-numbing 447-mile journey that took them two days.

“That was the only trip that we actually made up the river,” said Mike Krantz, who oversees the 65 U.S. retailers that market the Australian Zhik brand of watersport clothing from his headquarters in Flowery Branch near Atlanta. “It was one of those things where we both loved the outdoors and being on the river, so we decided to make that first trip. And once we did, we just kept going.

“Those trips were, as usual, about father-and-son bonding. I know, looking back, I was not the most pleasant teenager. But put the two of us on that boat, and all of that (teen angst) went away.”

Dave Krantz thought he wanted to be a lawyer. He studied at Tennessee Tech, Georgia State and John Marshall universities, got his law degree, worked as a title lawyer for a year, found out in a hurry that was not for him, so he wrangled a job with The A.C. Nielsen Co. in their food and drug division.

He was servicing shopping centers and malls in the southern and south-central sectors of the U.S., “traveling 2 1/2 to 3 weeks a month,” and quickly grew sick of that. At a friend’s urging, Krantz applied for a job as manager of the Greenville Mall (“a job I knew nothing about and had no chance of getting”) got the job, and suddenly found himself with a new career.

He would manage the Peachtree Mall in Columbus, the Macon Mall, other shopping centers in the region and finally the Albany Mall.

“Then the internet came along and shopping centers went to heck,” Krantz said.

With the Greenville-to-New Orleans leg of his dreamed-of trek covering the length of the Mississippi checked off his list, the retired Krantz got the idea in 2010 to cover the remainder of the river. But going from Point A to Point B was not Krantz’s style.

“I figured it out that we could go all the way from Minneapolis to Greenville to cover the rest of the Mississippi, but while I was studying on it I saw that we could go all the way to Albany by water,” Krantz said. “It took us 18 days — well, 17 and a day layover — to cover the 2,107 miles, but we did it. We went down the Mississippi to the Ohio, up the Ohio River and over to Tennessee, over to the Tom Bigby River and down to Mobile, then across the Intercoastal Waterway through Appalachicola to Lake Seminole and then up the Flint River to Albany.

“This time we were in a 16-foot boat with a 25-horse Yamaha.”

During that momentous trip, completed when Dave Krantz was 70 and Mike 48, Krantz kept a journal that was later featured on the ESPN Outdoors website. The Krantzes’ travelogue also appeared in installments in The Albany herald.

“I had a friend who was the Outdoors editor for the Little Rock, Ark., paper, and he was heading up ESPN’s website,” Dave Krantz said. “He said they’d be excited to run the story of our trip. They did the same in The Herald, but when I called the Atlanta Journal and asked them if they were interested, their editor said, real snippy, ‘It doesn’t fit our format.’ I told her next time I’d try to rob a convenience store every day down the river.”

When Krantz grew weary during the expedition, he thought of the thousands of people who kept up with his daily reports on a popular fishing forum. Some even told him they’d pay him so much money for every mile the Krantzes completed.

“I thought about calling my buddy to come pick me up several times,” Krantz admits, “but I had no choice but to keep going.”

Ever the completists, the next year the Krantzes took care of some unfinished business: completing the length of the Mississippi. They put in in Cairo, Ill., and completed the 400-mile trip in two days.

In 2014, 74-year-old Dave and 52-year-old Mike (Peggy Krantz says with the sweetness of a loving wife and a twinkle in her eye, “Mike babysits daddy for me”) took on and conquered the Missouri River, traveling from Yankton, S.Dak., to St. Louis (786 miles). This time, though, they had the wives follow along on land with a van and boat trailer handy, just in case. Then, a couple of months ago, the Krantzes completed their run of major U.S. rivers with their trip along the Ohio.

(Dave Krantz authored an online book about his journeys — “Old Goat in a Tin Boat” — that The Herald will review in a future edition.)

The obvious question: What’s next? Does this odyssey continue or have the Krantzes done with their conquests?

“Dad and I have about decided that we’ve had enough of it,” Mike Krantz says. “We started this when he was 38 and I was 16. That’s a lot of miles on our butts.”

Krantz tends to agree with his son.

“We probably won’t do anymore,” he says, almost wistfully. “We’ve done all the major rivers.”

But when a reporter jokingly suggests a run at the Nile or the Amazon, Dave Krantz’s eyes light up. “That’s a thought,” he says.

Staff Photo: Carlton Fletcher
Staff Photo: Carlton Fletcher

Special Photo: Mike Krantz

Special Photo: Mike Krantz