Cuttin' loose with my paddle and my photo-editing software

Fall is low-water season on the lower Mississippi River, and the river has indeed been low this fall, but not as low as it can be.  Below-zero readings on the Memphis gauge are typical, but through September and October the level hovered between 5 and 10 feet.  As the dry weather drags on across the U.S., the river is only just now dropping lower: when I paddled yesterday the gauge reading was about 2.8 feet, and the forecast has it dropping below zero in the middle of next week.

I paddled for 60 minutes yesterday morning, and revved the engines more than I had done lately.  After doing three 8-stroke sprints in the harbor, I paddled out onto the Mississippi and headed for the waves behind an upstream-bound barge rig.  In the beginning my surfing attempts were on the timid side due to the cooler air and water temperatures, but eventually my confidence grew and I threw in some hard sprints that resulted in several decent rides.

Once the waves petered out I paddled up the Arkansas side toward the Hernando DeSoto Bridge until there were less than 20 minutes left in my hour; then I surged long and hard across the river and up the harbor to the monorail bridge.  It wore me out, but it felt really good just to paddle as hard as I could.

I haven't taken the Go Pro camera out since my last post, but I've been playing around a little with some of the editing features on iPhoto.  Here are a few more shots from last Sunday's set:


Number Four

My boat is pointed south/southwest; that's the Hernando DeSoto Bridge on my right, and you can see the Harahan and Frisco and Memphis-Arkansas bridges off to my left.  I clicked the "cooler" button several times to enhance the cooler colors in this photo.


Number Five

This photo got taken just a few moments later, by which time I was turning upstream toward the Hernando DeSoto Bridge.  I clicked the "cooler" button a bunch of times to make this photo look really cool.


Number Six

In this photo I'm heading into the mouth of the harbor toward the central part of downtown Memphis.  Here, I availed myself of iPhoto's option to turn a photo from color to black-and-white.


Number Seven

Now I'm a bit farther up into the harbor.  For this photo I clicked the "sepia" button, which I guess is supposed to give it sort of an old-timey look.


Thanks to everybody who commented on the photos in my last post.  If you have an opinion on any of these, feel free to share it.