In 2020, Adam Davis and I got together many Saturdays to paddle all up and down the Mississippi River at Memphis. It was our way of making the best of a global pandemic.
The Mississippi was quite high that spring and summer, providing vast liquid real estate for us to explore. In this photo, we're nearing the lower end of the Loosahatchie Chute, from which there is a lovely view of the downtown skyline.
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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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The South African championships in surf lifesaving took place last week at Kings Beach, Nelson Mandela Bay, near the Eastern Cape city of Gqeberha (Port Elisabeth).
I've mentioned before that participation in surf lifesaving is a cultural staple in South African beach communities including Fish Hoek, where I was back in January. It's also popular in Australia and New Zealand, and I believe it's no coincidence that these nations are the cream of the global crop in ocean sports like surfski racing. My coaches during the camp I attended in January, Dawid and Jasper Mocke, are both many-time medalists in surf lifesaving competition, and their children are well on their way to distinguished careers of their own. Dawid, who served as a venue announcer at the South African championships, is one of the voices calling the action in the video below.
In utilitarian terms, the main purpose of this activity is to train people for employment as beach lifeguards. But for many participants it leads to a lifetime of exploring what they can do with their bodies. In the video, you'll see athletes running both on the sand and into the surf, swimming, paddling surfskis, and competing on boards. It's not hard to see how a kid who starts surf lifesaving before age ten develops a Herculean cardiopulmonary capacity by his late teens. I thought about that a lot as I was gasping for breath on the Miller's Run back in January.
I'll point out one more detail: each surf lifesaving club has its own color scheme for the caps that the athletes wear. Those are Fish Hoek caps in the thumbnail image for the video.
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It’s a sure sign of spring: the arrival of the purple martins down at the marina on the riverfront where I keep my boat. I first noticed them the morning of March 21: that day there were just two, and I think they were “scouts” getting the house ready for their flock. By this past Friday morning there were at least a half dozen of them here. (The two visible in the photo were the only ones bold enough to stick around when I approached with my camera.)
The purple martins are one of those simple pleasures I enjoy when I go down to the dock, and I think that's an important part of being an athlete, to savor the little things about the places you go to train. To like those places. I genuinely like the environs of the harbor and the entire Memphis riverfront, and I think that helps motivate me to get my paddling in on a regular basis. Similarly, when I had my little dry-land routine going this past winter, I chose a spot in the Greenbelt Park overlooking the Mississippi River to do it. The routine felt hard and tedious at times, but I enjoyed being down there and I almost always came away feeling better than I'd felt beforehand.
I think this identification with a place is something accomplished athletes in all sports share. A dedicated basketball player will probably tell you that he enjoys being in the gym each day, with the echoes of the ball bouncing and sneakers squeaking against the hardwood floor, the popping sound he hears when he takes a shot and hits nothing but net, even the sweaty smell in the locker room.
The more you like the place where you do your sport, the more eager you'll be to get to work each day and make yourself accomplished in that sport.
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It's been a fairly light week as far as paddling goes. I sort of crashed mentally when I got home from Ocean Springs Sunday night, and I didn't paddle for the next several days. We had a chilly start to the week, and that didn't help my motivation. I'd originally planned to paddle Tuesday morning, but it was cool and breezy and I realized as I was getting my clothing and gear ready that I just didn't feel like it. So I bailed. I paddle because I want to, not because I have to.
Actually, I could have easily crashed this way when I got home from South Africa. By then I'd been working quite hard for several months, after all. But I knew I wanted to race at Ocean Springs, so I kept myself going a few weeks longer. Once that event was behind me, I couldn't ignore my need for a break.
It's also not helpful that my neck muscle continues to nag me. My chiropractor has been working on it for a month now, but we haven't achieved any lasting relief at this point. I'm pretty sure this is all part of the nerve impingement that an MRI revealed back in 2023, but I did feel pretty good for about a year from 2024 into 2025, and I'm longing to get back to that.
Finally, I currently have a hospitalized family member, and that's taking up a great deal of my time and attention right now.
By Thursday we were back to some unseasonably warm weather here in the Mid South, and I got myself back to the river for a relaxed hour of paddling. I did so again Friday morning, when the temperature was in the mid 60s Fahrenheit but dropping toward the 40s by later in the day.
Conditions improved this weekend, fortunately. It was on the cool side when I got to the river this morning, but the sun was out and the wind was calm. With the temperature rising quickly toward an afternoon high in the high 70s, it was really a lovely morning to paddle. I went out and did an easy 40 minutes before returning to the dock and heading back to the hospital.
This might be what I do for the next little while. For a couple of months after my return from the Grand Canyon last fall, I mostly did easy sessions of less than an hour. It gave me a chance to focus on technical stuff, and I think it set me up well to ramp the volume back up in December in preparation for the South Africa trip.
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Jeb Berry of Gulfport, Mississippi, paddles in the bow seat with his son Thaison just aft. The pair were the first to cross the finish line in the "Battle On The Bayou" canoe & kayak race at Ocean Springs yesterday.
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The "Battle On The Bayou" canoe & kayak race takes place each March on Old Fort Bayou at Ocean Springs, Mississippi. The inaugural event was in 2010, and it's happened every year since except 2020, when it was called off in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. That made yesterday's race the 16th installment of the event. I missed last year's race, but have attended all fifteen of the others.
Coming into yesterday's race, I had been the overall winner only three times, most recently way back in 2014. There's almost always been somebody there to give me tough competition for that honor. Yesterday my main challenger appeared to be a tandem boat paddled by Gulfport, Mississippi, residents Jeb Berry and his 16-year-old son Thaison. I mentioned in last week's photo feature that Jeb was recently diagnosed with cancer of the colon and liver. He began his treatment just last week, and decided that he was feeling good enough to go ahead and race. He seemed hale and hardy when I spoke to him before the race and I knew I couldn't take him lightly.
After the pre-race meeting I got in the boat, did some warmup paddling, and settled onto the starting line. As I sat there with some five minutes to go, Jeb and Thaison paddled into the starting area, and I knew they would have to move quickly to get their long tandem boat turned around and into position for a fair start. Before I knew it, the starting official gave us the 30-second warning, and what seemed like less than 30 seconds later, the starting horn went off.
I wasted little time getting my boat up to speed to put some distance on the pack in the opening meters. I glanced right and left, fully expecting to see the Berrys nearby, but they were nowhere in sight. They must have not been in ideal position when the race started, I thought, and I was a bit concerned because I wanted our competition to be fair. But I told myself to worry about my own self and I continued working to move my boat as quickly and efficiently as possible, knowing that they were entirely capable of reeling me in over a 70-minutes-plus race.
I paddled hard but mostly relaxed as I covered one kilometer, then two, then three. All the while I kept my ears open for the sound of Jeb's voice or any other clue that I had company up at the front of the race. There was plenty of race still to come, but once or twice I dared to think that maybe this was the year I would finally claim another overall title here in Ocean Springs.
Then, about five kilometers in, those hopes went down the tubes.
Old Fort Bayou is a narrow creek that meanders through a broad swath of marshland as it approaches its mouth in the Back Bay of Biloxi. There is one spot on the race course where it is very easy to make a wrong turn. Here's a satellite image of that spot:
That's Bayou Talla coming in from the north. The green arrows show where racers are supposed to go, and the red arrows show the wrong turn that is so tempting to the unwitting paddler.
I have now been that guy three times. In the 2021 race I was one of about four boats in the lead pack, and when we reached this part of the course I started to make the turn indicated by the red arrows. Fortunately, one of the other boats in the pack was a tandem paddled by Jeb Berry and Ocean Springs local Nick Kinderman, and Nick alerted me to keep going straight. Tragedy averted.
The very next year, I was sitting in second place overall, a minute or so behind the father-daughter tandem of Mike and Savanna Herbert of Rogers, Arkansas. They made the red-arrow mistake, and I followed them. When I rounded the little sliver of island in the middle, the Herberts were paddling back toward me, and I knew we had screwed up. Happily, we managed to get back on course quickly enough that the final results were what they probably would have been anyway: Mike and Savanna cruised to a comfortable victory, and I took second place overall.
That brings us back to yesterday. It's easy to sit here and look at the satellite image and think, "Well, DUH... just follow the green arrows!" But down at water level, the right way to go is anything but obvious. Yesterday I was all by myself in first place, with nobody around to guide me, and certainly not any green arrows painted on the surface of the water. What's more, at that time of morning the sun was right in my eyes, making the correct route look like a possible dead end. And so I made the infuriatingly-easy mistake. The race organizers really ought to post a person there to keep racers on the right course--not just a buoy, not just a sign, but a person. They have never done so, and all I can say is that unless they do, wrong turns will happen here again.
I had about reached the end of that last red arrow when I heard some voices yelling at me. I believe it was the Berrys, who had spotted me through the little passage marked "A" on the satellite photo. I looked around and saw another paddler, Don Hicks of Cabot, Arkansas, who had followed me on my march to folly. At this moment I could not see the slot marked "A," and I thought the only way to paddle back on course was to go back to the beginning of the red arrows. I took a gamble and paddled over to about where point "B" is marked, hoping maybe I could portage over the marsh to the race course. But I couldn't get a visual on just how much ground I would have to cover, or if I could do so without sinking ankle-deep in mud. By this time Don was paddling toward the "A" slot, so I got back in the boat and followed him.
By the time I was back on course, somewhere between ten and twenty boats had overtaken me. I figured running down the Berrys was probably a lost cause, but I felt pretty certain I could still take everybody else. The challenge now was to stay calm and be patient, and not try to put the hammer down and catch everybody right away. I still had some 60 percent of the race left to go, after all.
Little by little, I worked my way up through the field. I rounded the big island by the Fort Bayou apartments and entered the second half of the course, retracing the route back to where we'd started. Along the way I saw familiar faces: Nick's wife Kelly Kinderman; Karen Kesselring of Hot Springs Village, Arkansas; Billy Howell (friends call him "Chilly" Billy) of Coahoma, Mississippi; Robert Brooks of Biloxi, Mississippi; double surfski paddlers Nova Cross and Nate Payne of Ocean Springs; the Gulfport outrigger C2 team of Penny and Lynn Sanburn.
Off in the distance I could see the last person, other than Thaison and Jeb, still in front of me. It was Don Hicks, and that made sense, seeing as how he'd been the next-fastest paddler behind me when I made my wrong turn. He had a good lead, but I could tell I was whittling away at it. I set my sights on him and finally pulled onto his wake as we passed beneath the Washington Avenue drawbridge, about 1300 meters from the finish. I rode his wash for several minutes to gather myself for a strong final surge.
With 700 meters to go, I dug in and pulled away. I could see Jeb and Thaison paddling their post-finish cooldown as I sprinted the last several hundred meters. I crossed the finish line with a time of one hour, 13 minutes, 47 seconds, and it turned out that was just a little over two minutes behind the Berrys (1:11:30).
Don finished the race 28 seconds behind me. A short while later Team Sanburn crossed the line with a time of 1:15:23.
The fastest solo female finisher was Kim Arnold-Bridwell of Gulfport. Her time was 1:23:47, two minutes and three seconds faster than Karen Kesselring.
The complete results are available here.
My G.P.S. device measured the course at 12.27 kilometers. My best guess is that I added two to three hundred meters to my distance with my red-arrow blunder, so I would say the course is about an even 12 kilometers. That's not quite seven and a half miles. The course, altered slightly from what it had been in previous years, had been advertised as "8-ish" miles.
Looking back, I'm satisfied with how I did. It feels good to have come back to take the title among solo paddlers after going off-course and wasting four or five minutes. I'm just sorry I didn't get a chance to compete with the Berrys for that overall title. I expect they're sorry about that as well. But I hope they can savor their victory, especially considering the off-the-water challenges that Jeb faces in the coming months. (Once again, I hope folks will consider helping out with his expenses by chipping in a few bucks here. Even with insurance, having a serious illness is an expensive state of affairs.)
The weather was beautiful, and I enjoyed visiting with friends before the awards were handed out. Once all business was concluded I set sail back north to my humble hometown on the mighty Mississippi.
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My week began with some dry-needling treatment at the chiropractor's office. The chiropractor warned that I would probably feel worse before feeling better, and that's been the case as my muscles react to being stuck with those needles. I've been living with this pain in the right side of my neck for close to six weeks now, and it's making my whole body feel out of whack. Like I've said before, it doesn't directly interfere with paddling, but the discomfort is pretty severe nevertheless... it makes me feel like I'm not paddling well even when I probably am. I've got an almost OCD-caliber desire for balance and symmetry in all my affairs, and I'm feeling anything but balanced and symmetrical these days.
Meanwhile, I'm signed up to race down at Ocean Springs this Sunday, and I'm trying to go through my pre-race motions this week. It was cold and miserable outside on Monday and Tuesday, so I took those two days off. The forecast for Wednesday was a high temperature around 65 degrees Fahrenheit, but it was still in the low 50s when I went down to the river that morning, and a fierce south wind made it seem colder than that. I paddled into the teeth of that wind toward the mouth of the harbor, and then turned around to do a few 12-stroke sprints with the wind at my back. I did ten of them at two-minute intervals, and at some point I managed to tweak a muscle in my right lower back. Wasn't that just all I needed...
Yesterday morning I did some back stretch exercises that I think eased the lower back pain. I went back to the river and got in the boat, and this time I did eight of those 12-stroke sprints. The wind wasn't blowing nearly as hard and that helped me feel more comfortable, though the neck pain was quite an annoyance. It's hard to feel like I'm ready to go out and compete with an ailment like that nagging at me.
By this morning the back pain was about gone, I think. I went downtown and did six 12-stroke sprints. When I got back home I tried putting some ice on my sore neck muscle. It hadn't occurred to me to do so until last night when I got to a part of a book I'm currently reading where the narrator, a doctor, talks about putting ice on a trauma victim's edema. I figured it couldn't hurt to try it on my neck. So far I've done it just once, and maybe it's helped a little... hard to tell. I'll do it once more this evening and again tomorrow, because why not... right?
The plan for tomorrow is to do several more of those sprints in the harbor, and then load up the boat and embark on the six-hour drive down to the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
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