A trip around the Bar

This morning I went out for a longer paddle--a trip around the Loosahatchie Bar.  The Loosahatchie Bar is the big island you see looking upriver as you take Interstate 40 over the Hernando DeSoto Bridge.

I paddle around the Bar several times a year.  It affords views of the many faces of the Mississippi River at Memphis.  You get the big-city feel as you paddle out the harbor by the cobblestones, with the tall buildings of downtown up on the bluff; you see various city-dwellers availing themselves of the Greenbelt Park for walking, running, fishing, relaxing, and more; you experience a little heavy industry as you paddle by the Maynard C. Stiles wastewater treatment plant and the sand and gravel operation up above it; and you feel like you're in sure-enough wilderness as you paddle down the Loosahatchie Chute on the Arkansas side of the Bar, with nothing in sight but water and forest.

I think I average two and a quarter hours or so when I paddle around the Loosahatchie Bar, starting and finishing at Harbortown Marina.  Once or twice I have broken two hours, but I don't expect to do so these days because an enormous sand deposit has formed at the north end of the Bar in recent years, adding a fair bit of paddling distance to the course.  Today I made the journey in 130 minutes.  That included hopping out of the boat for brief swims in the Loosahatchie Chute.

I'm a little surprised at how soft I've gotten after just ten days or so out of the boat: by the time I was halfway through today, a couple of sizable blisters had formed on my left hand.

I paddled my surf ski today.  As I've said earlier, I want to spend as much of my paddling time this summer as possible in the K1, but with the water still fairly high for this time of year (it was about 19.3 feet on the Memphis gauge this morning), I decided to get out and see some of the beautiful sights that aren't accessible by boat during the low-water months of late summer and fall.  Also, it's probably not the worst thing to break up the K1 paddling with some time in a boat I'm more comfortable with, lest I end up wobbling around in all my other boats like I've been doing in the K1.