Springlike

It's been a surreal January week with Fahrenheit temperatures climbing into the 70s at times.  There's been a fair amount of rain along with it, but during breaks in the rain I've seen people sitting out on decks and patios at restaurants around town.

One thing we've barely seen this week is sunshine.  I for one feel a bit vulnerable to that Seasonal Affective Disorder.  The annoying hassles of everyday life start to feel like real bummers at times like this.

It hasn't quite been shorts-and-short-sleeved-tee-shirt weather down on the river, but I've been dressing lighter than usual for this time of year.  I haven't worn pogies since the sub-freezing spell we had two weekends ago.

On Tuesday I joined Joe for a lap of the harbor.  Joe had missed several previous Tuesdays because of business travel and other conflicts, and it was good to catch up with him.

Thursday was foggy and rainy.  My outer layers got soaked as I walked down to the marina from the car; that rain let up after a short time, and I spent the next 60 minutes paddling in a heavy, drizzly fog.  Another heavy shower moved through as I paddled the last several hundred meters back to the dock.  The temperature was in the mid 60s, but wet is wet, and I was glad to get into the dry clothes that I had stored safely out of the rain.

The sun finally came out for a few hours this morning.  By late morning the temperature was in the low 70s, and I saw a few people walking around in shorts and short sleeves along the riverfront.  I decided to do my "long" paddle for the week, usually a Sunday ritual, today.  Tomorrow's weather isn't looking nearly as nice as today's, and I also have to make a little road trip down to Jackson, Mississippi, and back tomorrow, and I'd just as soon not do that while exhausted from a long, hard paddle.

So today I went down to the river planning to paddle around the Loosahatchie Bar.  This circumnavigation becomes possible once the river rises above 12 or 13 feet on the Memphis gauge.  In recent years I haven't considered doing it below about 16 feet: the 2011 flood deposited a bunch of sand up at the north (upstream) end of the bar, making for very shallow water at lower levels.  The reading this morning was 17.2 feet, so I was hopeful I'd have adequate depth up there.

A trip around the Loosahatchie Bar, starting and finishing at Harbortown Marina, is roughly twelve and a half miles.  This varies according to the water level and how tight I make my lines along the way.  When I finished today's paddle my G.P.S. device told me I had traveled 12.66 miles.

Most of the time, paddling around the Loosahatchie Bar takes me a little over two hours.  There are many variables that affect this elapsed time.  Water level is a big one: the higher the water, the smaller the bar is because more of it is underwater; the southern tip of Mud Island is also more submerged.  Meanwhile, the long upstream paddle to get to the north end of the bar is easier at some levels than at others.

Today's level wasn't bad for that upstream leg: I had some good long eddies in which I got the boat moving over 7 miles per hour at times.  But up at the north end of the bar there was a lot of exposed sand, and I had to paddle farther north than usual to get up and around it.  So it was a good day for a fast time, but perhaps not the best day.  Whatever the case, I completed the trip two hours, 30 seconds after I'd started.  I think that's the fastest I've done a trip around the bar in a few years.  I think I've done it under two hours once or twice, and I'd have to refer to my old handwritten journals to see what the conditions were like when I did so.

(To learn more about the Loosahatchie Bar, look at the Google map on my harbor page.  Scroll up a little bit, and you'll see a big island in the river upstream of the Hernando DeSoto (Interstate 40) Bridge.  That's the Loosahatchie Bar.)

I understand a stormy front is supposed to come through overnight tonight, with cooler weather moving in behind it for tomorrow.  It's not supposed to be freezing cold--I think tomorrow's high will be in the high 50s--but I probably won't see people out in shorts.