Well, it's been nearly two months since I last posted something on this blog. That's as long a break from blogging as I can remember taking since I started this thing up in 2012. I thank any readers who are still checking in here, who haven't given up on me.
I've had a lot to deal with in my non-athletic life, most notably a sharp decline in my mother's health. I've been spending much less attention to paddling and all the other things I do.
That doesn't mean I haven't been paddling at all. I've been getting in the boat four times a week most weeks. But most of my sessions have been short--40 or 50 minutes, occasionally 60. It's been feeling like an effort "just to get something in."
But that doesn't mean my paddling sessions haven't been valuable. Certainly, they're vital to my mental health, and I've been using them to focus on stroke mechanics and other technical matters.
Meanwhile, there's one particular course on my local landscape that I try to navigate at least once a year: a trip around the Loosahatchie Bar. This image, which Adam Davis generated with his G.P.S. device when he and I paddled around the Bar a few years ago, shows what's involved:
Paddling around the Bar isn't possible when the Mississippi is low, because the Loosahatchie Chute is dry land. A level of 15 or 16 feet on the Memphis gauge is what I'd call the minimum for a trip around the Bar, but because of a large sandbar up at the north end (deposited in the big flood of 2011), you have to either do some portaging or paddle a lot of extra distance to get around it. So I like to wait until the river is flowing higher than 20 feet.
The numbers on the image above are mile markers. Adam started and finished at the cobblestone landing, and as you can see, his total distance was a little over 10 miles. I, meanwhile, keep my boat at the marina (circled in yellow) a mile or so up the harbor from where Adam launched. So my total distance for a trip around the Bar is about 12.5 miles.
Besides doing this paddle at least once a year, I have one other goal each time I do it: to break two hours. I think the fastest I've ever done it is a little under an hour and 50 minutes. I also sometimes fail to break two hours. There are all kinds of variables that have an impact on my speed. The eddies along the Tennessee bank are stronger at some levels than at others, and that affects how fast I can do the long pull upriver. The higher the river is, the more the northern end of the Bar and the southern end of Mud Island are underwater, and the more distance I can therefore cut off. A north strong wind slows me down as I paddle upstream, and a strong wind slows me down in the downstream leg; a strong south wind also creates rough water out in the river's main channel, and that slows me down further. And of course, sometimes I'm fit or well-rested or otherwise ready to go fast, and sometimes I'm not.
SO... with all that background info laid out, I'll get on with the main topic of this blog post: my circumnavigation of the Loosahatchie Bar yesterday, at which time the Mississippi River was at 20.4 feet on the Memphis gauge, thanks to rain in the Southeast and Midwest during the week. The wind was just a light northwest breeze and the river was calm, and I was feeling reasonably good, so I figured I could break two hours without too much trouble.
I eased into a comfortable pace as I paddled out of the harbor and headed upstream. I passed a couple of checkpoints seemingly on pace for a comfortable sub-two-hour trip: I passed beneath the Hernando DeSoto Bridge (at the 1-mark on the image above) less than 25 minutes in, and I reached the mouth of the Wolf River (at the 3-mark on the image above) less than 50 minutes in.
I continued on up past the Maynard C. Stiles sewage treatment plant, and ferried across the main channel in the same place that Adam and I did the day he generated the image above. That last stretch to the upper end of the Loosahatchie Bar is always a bit of a slog, as there's a lot of current to fight. I think of it as the paddling equivalent of summiting a mountain peak. The water was quite shallow up there, and I hit the bottom with my paddle a few times and even dragged my rudder a time or two. But it was better than having to portage.
There's a narrow little channel, somewhat visible in the image above, that I was able to navigate yesterday, although it was quite overgrown with brush--maybe the result of the river being low for so long this spring. For a minute I was afraid I was paddling into a dead end, but I found a slot that spit me out into the open Loosahatchie Chute.
I tried to stay relaxed as I moved down the Chute, and let the current do as much of the work as possible. But I was starting to sense that I'd fallen off the pace a bit. There are a couple of houses on the river-right bank that I like to get to by the 90-minute mark, and I came a couple of minutes short of doing that. Then, as I reached the lower end of the Bar and started working my way back into the current of the main channel, I saw a barge rig coming upriver that would force me to make an abrupt crossing of the channel rather than take a more direct line toward the entrance to the harbor. I looked at my watch and realized I would have to keep the hammer down the rest of the way to have any chance of breaking two hours.
Did I mention that I was getting tired? Paddling around the Loosahatchie Bar always takes it out of me. The long upstream leg, the ferry across the channel, the fight to reach the "summit"... it all combines to make this 12.5-mile circuit more like 16 or 17 miles on flatwater.
Paddling from the harbor's mouth back to my marina typically takes me about 15 minutes at a comfortable cruising pace. Yesterday I had passed the one-hour-47-minute mark when reached the harbor's mouth, so there would be nothing comfortable about this home stretch if I was going to come in under two hours. As soon as the marina came into view, I pointed my boat at the end of it where my dock is, and tried to stay locked on that line the rest of the way. I passed familiar landmarks like the monorail bridge and the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, and these gave me a good idea of the minimum pace I had to maintain. I passed beneath the A.W. Willis Bridge at about 1:58:30, and I knew then that I would make it... barely. I kept the boat gliding and reached the dock with less than 20 seconds to spare.
I have now paddled around the Loosahatchie Bar for 2026. It's possible I'll do it a time or two more; historically, I've gotten it in three or four times each year. But my goal is to do it once, and now I have.
I was dead tired the rest of the day yesterday, and this morning I knew an easy recovery paddle was in order. I went back to the river and got in the boat and just tried to relax and enjoy the morning. Paddling felt labored because of my fatigue, but I knew that doing some easy paddling would help me recover and feel better sooner rather than later.
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