The weather has chilled down for the weekend. Fahrenheit temperatures were in the 50s when I paddled both yesterday and today. Exactly the reason that I washed and put away some of my winter gear the other day, but not all of it.
Yesterday I paddled around the Loosahatchie Bar, the big island in the river upstream of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge. Starting and finishing at Harbortown Marina in the harbor, I think the distance is around twelve miles or twenty kilometers. And it's pretty tough: you have to fight some strong current as you paddle up the Tennessee side between the mouth of the Wolf River and the mouth of the Loosahatchie River, and then there's a long ferry across the Mississippi to enter the north end of the chute on the west side of the bar. There was enough water yesterday--20.4 feet on the Memphis gauge--that shallow water wasn't a problem up at the bar's upper end (the big flood of 2011 deposited a lot of sand up there). My elapsed time yesterday was 130 minutes, the last half-hour of which I was plenty worn out.
I woke up this morning feeling as back-to-normal as I've felt yet since I finished the antibiotics last week. My sleep is more or less back to normal, and my digestion is slowly becoming regular again. After a couple of tough days in the boat I was ready for a lighter session today. I paddled for 60 minutes at not an easy pace, but a comfortable one. I spent a lot of time out on the Mississippi since that's where I'll be racing down at Vicksburg next Saturday.
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