An enveloping shroud

The weather has settled down into what I'd call normal for the Mid South in January: chilly but not freezing cold, overcast and moist but not pouring down rain, a bit of breeze but not excessively windy.

The story of the weekend on the Memphis riverfront has been fog.  Both yesterday and today I got down to the river and found it covered in an even denser fog than I paddled in back on Thursday the 5th.  Paddling up the Mississippi from the mouth of the harbor, I couldn't see the Hernando DeSoto Bridge at all until I was within a quarter-mile of it; its M-shaped steel trusses weren't visible until I was within a hundred yards of it.

I felt tired in the boat yesterday, probably because I'd paddled hard on Thursday and started a new strength routine on Friday.  Knowing I'd be going longer and harder today, I kept the intensity moderate and spent my 60 minutes on the water focusing on good precise strokes and full rotation.

Today it was a bit chillier--around 46 degrees Fahrenheit versus 50 degrees yesterday--but the water was calm and I set out on my trek up the Mississippi and Wolf Rivers to the Danny Thomas Boulevard bridge over the Wolf and back.

I hadn't checked the river level and I was sort of assuming the Mississippi was high enough to back up the Wolf a couple of miles, sparing me from paddling against the current until just a short distance from my turnaround point.  What I didn't know was that the river had dropped almost three feet since Thursday--from over 13 feet on the Memphis gauge to 10.8 feet this morning.  And so I found myself fighting the Wolf's current almost the entire way from its mouth up to the Danny Thomas bridge.

It wasn't that big a deal, really, except that it interfered with my G.P.S.-aided pace plan.  I did a couple of mile-long surges on the Wolf with the intention of maintaining around 6.8 to 7.0 miles per hour.  But going against the current I had to work unexpectedly hard to exceed 6.5 mph, and then coming back down with the current I was making 7.0 while not paddling hard at all.  Basically, I had to rely on my inner sense of pace to do the workout the way I'd intended.

By the time I got back down to the mouth of the Wolf, the fog had lifted enough for me to see the Hernando DeSoto Bridge from there.  I was able to paddle out in the main flow of the Mississippi without worrying about a barge rig coming out of nowhere right in front of me.

When I eased back alongside the dock at the end of 120 minutes, the G.P.S. told me I'd covered about 12.5 miles.