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Lets see a tuber stops at the gravel bar in the middle of the stream then walks off unto a private land owners property to take a dump. The land owner who is armed confronts the drunk party of tubers, one of the drunks tries to grab the land owner & gets shot for being stupid is that the basic premise of this story ?

If so there is a lesson here RESPECT THE LAND OWNER & DON’T TRY TO WRESTLE AN ARMED LAND OWNER. Hope this has been a useful teachable moment.

"These cases are really very confusing. They are difficult to interpret,” Styron said. “You are on private property, but you have a right to be there if it’s a navigable stream and as long as you are on a gravel bar that is submerged during parts of the year, because it’s part of the stream bed.”

We were canoeing down a river in Arkansas many years ago and came upon a landowner sitting on the bank with a shotgun. He told us to pull up, and we did, of course.

He said he owned both sides of the river and therefore thought he owned the river bed too. It was clearly a navigable river, at least by canoe and raft. We told him we were from out of state and weren't aware of the situation. We did not argue with him. He let us go. I gather landowners like him were making the claim in court that they owned the river, but I never heard any legal outcome.

I found the court decision in Arkansas concerning the river we were canoeing down. The court declared the river navigable, and thus the landowner did not own the river itself even though he owned the land on both sides of it. See: Link