Gaw-lee! That's some big water!

Martha and I woke up in a downpour at Battle Run Campground on Summersville Lake.  I threw together some breakfast and coffee as fast as I could, and then we drove down to the upper Gauley River putin just below Summersville Dam.

I immediately horned in on a solitary dude named Brian and convinced him to let me paddle with him.  Martha helped shuttle his car to the takeout, and when we returned to the putin his friends Jay and Shannon had arrived to give us a foursome.  We were ready to paddle.

I wasn't exactly feeling "in the zone" today--my lack of recent whitewater paddling combined with my vague memory of the river made me a little tentative, and I let lots of opportunities to do cool stuff pass me by.  But that's okay.  I've got two more days to work on it.

The rain continued all day, but it's supposed to move out overnight tonight.  I'm generally fine on the river in the rain, but it'll be easier for Martha to find things to do if the weather is nice.

Playing in double-A, trying to get back to triple-A

Martha and I are on the road to West Virginia.  We spent last night in the old part of Marion, Virginia.

Yesterday we swung by the Ocoee River in southeast Tennessee, because I wanted to run an easy, familiar river and make sure I still know what I'm doing in a whitewater boat.  What I discovered is that my river-running skill should be just fine for getting down the Gauley in one piece, but I'm not very sharp on the more advanced moves.  My success rate on some of the moves I've been making for years on the Ocoee was only fifty percent or so.  Yesterday I approached such moves from the Carl Swensson perspective: if I failed to execute a move, I didn't just keep trying until I was blue in the face, but rather asked myself what I could do differently that might improve my chances for success.

Monday photo feature

Richard Carson runs Iron Ring in a photo I took during my first trip to the Gauley River in West Virginia in 1994.

I've been back to the Gauley maybe four or five times since then, but it's been about a decade since my last visit.  It's time to get back there, and that's what I plan to do this coming weekend.  Martha and I will leave tomorrow and spend a day at the Ocoee River, where I'll make sure I remember how to paddle my whitewater boat, and then we'll move on up to West Virginia for paddling on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

I can never look at this photo without some sadness, for Richard died in 1999 on the North Fork of the Payette River in Idaho.  His fate is a reminder for me to exercise caution and good judgement whenever I'm on the river.  At the same time, I believe that the most dangerous thing I'll do this week is not the paddling but driving my car to get there.

Dragon boats in Memphis

I had a couple of good sessions on the water this weekend.  The Mississippi is very low but it appears that water is on its way from higher places.  The Tennessee and Ohio drainages apparently have gotten some rain.

Yesterday the second annual dragon boat races were underway as I paddled out of the harbor.  I participated last year as a member of the Outdoors, Inc., team, but since that company did not enter a team this year I sat this one out.  It looked like everybody was having a swell time.

Low on power and water

A big front came through late Monday and when Joe and I spent an hour paddling in the harbor yesterday morning, it was noticeably cooler with a stiff north wind.

I'm still learning all the quirks of my Go Pro camera.  Using it for the first time after charging it a few days earlier, I had it quit on me after only a couple of minutes because the battery was dead.  Apparently those things don't hold their charge very long.

It was a shame, because in several spots in the harbor the Asian carp were really jumping, and that would have made for some fun footage.  But I reckon I'll have more chances to film some flying fish.

I think the places where the fish were jumping were particularly shallow.  We got a bump in the water level after Hurricane Isaac, but now the river is dropping out of sight again.  Yesterday's level was -9.0 feet on the Memphis gauge.

Monday photo feature

Joe Royer took this picture of me during the Wolf River Harbor Cleanup this past Saturday.  A variety of groups, including groups of honor students from Christian Brothers University and the University of Memphis, spread out along the banks between Harbortown Marina and the harbor's mouth and spent a couple of hours picking up litter.  I, meanwhile, paddled up and down the harbor and retrieved floating litter that they couldn't reach.

For the moment, the areas covered by these volunteers look significantly better.  But I'm afraid more such events will be necessary in the future.

Catching up

Once again I'm sorry for the dropoff in posting lately.  A whole lot of stuff has been going on outside my boat.  These days I'm trying to get on the water about three times a week, during which I work on my form and technique but mostly just enjoy myself.

On Thursday I arrived at the marina at the same time as my friend Joe Royer, and we paddled together up to the mouth of the Wolf and back.  Joe and I get together for workouts quite a bit during the spring race season, but our schedules tend to diverge during other parts of the year.  It was fun to catch up on things with him.  I strongly believe that sessions like this, where you're paddling a nice steady pace that isn't too intense to allow conversation with a companion, are the most valuable.  In other words, if you don't have much time to train, give this sort of session priority over intense intervals and stuff like that.  In addition to smoothing out your stroke, you're building your aerobic system with new capillary beds in your paddling muscles to facilitate blood flow there.  Distance runners call this an "LSD" (long steady distance) session, and it's the bread and butter of their training.

Regular readers of this blog have seen me mention the litter problem on the Memphis riverfront.  In the last couple of years a group of honor students at the University of Memphis has teamed up with the national group Living Lands and Waters to tackle the considerable litter problem in McKellar Lake, a slackwater harbor downriver from downtown Memphis.  This summer Joe approached this group about doing a similar event in Wolf River Harbor, the slackwater harbor right at downtown Memphis where he and I and other people keep our boats.  The resulting event took place this past Saturday, sponsored by Joe's company, Outdoors, Inc.

Groups from all over town, including groups of honor students from the U of M and Christian Brothers University, showed up to help out.  While volunteers spread out along the banks between Harbortown Marina and the harbor's mouth to address the huge quantities of trash there, I paddled my boat up and down the harbor in search of floating litter, which I picked up and ferried to the bank where a volunteer could put it in his bag.

Yesterday morning I went back downtown to paddle with Joe and his wife, Carol Lee.  We admired the results of the cleanup effort: the banks looked significantly better and should remain so for the duration of this low-water period.  Of course, eventually the water will rise again, and when it drops after that a whole batch of new litter will be deposited.  And as we paddled along yesterday, we noticed quite a bit of floating trash that had moved in to replace what I had plucked from the water.  So these cleanup events are not a permanent solution to the problem.  I think they are important because they demonstrate that many people value clean water in this community, but the only thing that will rid us of the problem for good is an attitudinal change throughout our society.

More Go Pro fun

I paddled with Meghan this morning, and tried out the head strap that came with my Go Pro camera.  It's quite comfortable and works great as long as you don't mind looking ridiculous.  The best thing about it is the camera is always in reach and you have immediate control over what you're shooting.  The downside is it's hard to keep your head still enough to get a nice steady shot.

Summer's still breathing its fire

We're having the worst wave of hot weather since that brutal stretch we had back in July.  Yesterday's high was 99 degrees with a heat index up around 105 or so, and as I rode my bike down to the river this morning, I could tell today would be similar.  I felt fully immersed in lower Mississippi swelter as I walked my bike down the ramp to the marina.

I did the 60-minute session that's been standard for me lately.  I played around some more with my Go Pro camera, too.

The last fifteen minutes or so were tough as I paddled up the harbor back to the marina.  The breeze was at my back and the sun beat down relentlessly.  By the time I got home, I was soaked and worn out, and all I wanted to do was dry off and take a nap.

This evening our iconic Memphis weatherman Dave Brown confirmed what I already knew: it was darn hot today.  98 degrees was the high.  Relief is on the way, however: a front is due through here tomorrow night (possibly with some violent thunderstorms), and then the high on Saturday is supposed to be in the high 70s.  I am so ready.

Going pro

I think the remnants of Hurricane Isaac have moved on from the Memphis area.  But then, I thought that yesterday too, and then around suppertime a gigantic thundershower dumped nearly two inches of rain here in just a half hour or so.  Martha and I were out at the time, and we had to negotiate several flooded streets on our way home.

Down on the riverfront this morning it was bright and sunny, but it was the usual story after a heavy rain: the harbor was teeming with litter that had been flushed from the storm drains.  I picked up enough trash to fill the milk crate that's mounted on the back of my bike, but that represented a tiny fraction of a percent of what was floating down there.

It's easy to get mad at the litter bugs among us--if they didn't litter, after all, we wouldn't have trash in the harbor or anywhere else it shouldn't be--but the real problem is that we as a society have decided it's okay to use something once and then throw it away, and I think only a shift away from that attitude will make a real difference.

On a happier note, I spent some time today playing around with the Go Pro camera that Martha gave me for my birthday last week.  I mounted it on my bike handlebars and filmed the ride down to the river, and then stuck it on the back deck of my boat for my paddling session.

I got some interesting footage, I guess, but don't look for me to post it anytime soon.  There's already too much footage on You Tube and Vimeo and similar sites of people paddling from the point of view of their bow or stern decks.  What I really want to do is collect a bunch of footage over a few years, and then edit it down into an interesting short film that somebody might actually enjoy watching.

Record low averted for the moment

Yesterday I paddled for 60 minutes on a river that registered -9.8 feet on the Memphis gauge.  That's within a foot of the record low of -10.7 feet, but it looks like we won't be breaking that for at least the next week, as the forecast has the river rising at least two feet in the next few days.

The remnants of Hurricane Isaac apparently have dropped enough precipitation in the Tennessee and Ohio valleys to send some water down here to Memphis.  We have gotten relatively little rain here at Memphis, but rain here does not affect the Mississippi's level at Memphis.  Nor does rain in Arkansas and southern Missouri, because those watersheds drain into the St. Francis, White, and Arkansas Rivers, which enter the Mississippi downstream of Memphis, and the Red River, which feeds the Atchafalaya.

To make the Mississippi rise at Memphis, rain must fall in the Tennessee valley, the Midwest, and the upper Great Plains.  That's where the tributaries are that feed the Mississippi upriver from Memphis--tributaries like the Tennessee River, the Cumberland River, the Ohio River, the Missouri River, and, of course, the upper Mississippi River.

For a while, I wasn't sure Isaac was going to send any rain up into those regions.  It sounded like its remnants were mostly affecting northern Louisiana, Arkansas, and central Mississippi.  Here at Memphis we got a lot of wind but not much rain besides a couple of heavy thundershowers.  But now it appears that some rain is falling up in places that will send some water our way.

Yesterday's paddling session certainly was a windy one.  I did some balance drills on the procession of waves moving from south to north in the harbor.