Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Welcome, thru-paddler

Today is one of the days that enable us to say we have mild winters here in the Mid South.  Skies are clear and the temperature was in the 40s Fahrenheit while I was on the water this morning, on its way to a high in the 50s.

Up, up, up comes the river!  As I paddled this morning the Memphis gauge reading was about 21.8 feet.  It's supposed to crest around 22 feet in the next several days.

I paddled for 60 minutes.  After a ten-minute warmup, I did six pieces at one-minute intervals where each piece consisted of eight backstrokes followed by six forward strokes at maximum intensity.  The idea was to get a little power-building exercise by overcoming the backward inertia.

There's a guy named Kev Brady who is currently paddling a canoe down the Mississippi River from its source at Lake Itasca to the Gulf of Mexico.  I've been following his Face Book page; he's raising money for a charity in his native England, and there is information about that here.  Right at this moment he is in Memphis, and I spotted his canoe ("Orca") on the dock at the little gas station next to Mud Island Marina.  I noticed that other people had written notes on the boat in magic marker, so I borrowed a marker from the store clerk and wrote one of my own.

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