Monday photo feature

My friend Joe Royer shot this lovely photo of Muscovy ducks on my dock at dusk six years ago.

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Ebbing pain for me and some legal pain for a friend

I rode my bike for a little over an hour on Friday.  I hadn't been riding that much lately and it felt good to get back to some of that.

I'm happy to report that by yesterday morning the oblique muscles in the right side of my torso were feeling significantly better.  I could still feel some tenderness in the area once I was in the boat, however, so I limited myself to 40 minutes of easy paddling, and I stayed in the northern half of the harbor, because if I paddled down to the harbor's mouth and saw barge traffic out on the Mississippi, I might have been tempted to go out and surf.

This morning there was again just a hint of discomfort in my oblique as I launched from the dock, so again I kept the paddling to 40 minutes.  This time I did go down to the mouth of the harbor, but there was no commercial traffic on the river, so I was led not into temptation.

In other canoe & kayak news, one of this country's most decorated athletes was arrested next to the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.  Davey Hearn, a two-time world champion and three-time Olympian in whitewater slalom, was out on a bike ride and stopped to have a look at the pool's peeling paint.  When he reached down to touch one of the big loose flakes, National Park police swooped in, handcuffed him, and booked him on charges of vandalism.  The story has been picked up by news outlets across the nation and the world; you can read the BBC account here.  In the 30-plus years that I've known Davey I've never heard him utter anything even approaching a lie, so his claims in the story are perfectly credible to me.  Of course, I wasn't there and I don't know precisely what took place, but I'm happy to offer that bit of character-witness testimony.

It's actually not the first time Davey has run afoul of the authorities while doing little more than living his life.  30 years ago, a few months after Davey had won the second of his two world titles and a few months before he made the second of his three U.S. Olympic teams, the Potomac River rose to flood levels.  While most people looked out over the river and saw danger (and they weren't wrong, I should note), Davey looked out over the river near his home in Bethesda and saw "the perfect wave," and decided to go out and surf.  Before long there was a helicopter circling overhead, and police were yelling at Davey to get off the river.  When he did so, the cops descended and put him in cuffs, and the response of one officer in particular was way out of proportion with what the situation called for.  Eventually a judge dismissed the case, and I hope the same will occur when Davey reports to court on the 9th of July.

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A good weekend getaway and some muscle pain

My paddling friend from Louisville, Scott Cummins, and I agreed we were ready to escape the grinds of our respective lives for a couple of days.  So we met up for some camping and paddling last weekend at Land Between The Lakes.  This National Recreation Area sits between Kentucky Lake, a reservoir on the Tennessee River, and Lake Barkley, an impoundment on the Cumberland River.  It's roughly equidistant from our hometowns.

As I mentioned in a post back in January, Scott is now the owner of Venture Sport, Inc., an importer of racing kayaks from several South African manufacturers.  He brought along a couple of boats made by the Fenn company for me to try.

I've never claimed any great expertise in canoe and kayak design.  To be honest, it's just not an aspect of the sport that interests me all that much.  That doesn't mean I don't consider it important to have a well-designed boat; I absolutely do.  It's just that when the time comes for me to get a new boat, the process of evaluating the available designs and selecting the best one for me feels like kind of a nuisance that I want to be done with as quickly as possible so that I can get back on the water and, you know... paddle.

Over the years I've relied on this rule of thumb when shopping for a new boat: try out a few designs from the most reputable manufacturers, and go with the one that you feel most comfortable in.  My rule might not be especially empirical or grounded in scientific method, but it has served me well enough.  Last weekend I started out in a Sailfish, and I felt very comfortable in that boat.  It was stable but also glided very nicely.  After a while I switched to a Cuda, and I found it much less comfortable, mainly because of its lower primary stability.  The secondary stability was good, and I never really felt like I was going to flip, but I was still expending lots of energy just keeping my balance so I could take good effective strokes.  I should add that there was a great deal of slop out on Kentucky Lake from all the motorized boat traffic, especially on Saturday afternoon, so a fair amount of open-water survival skill was required.

If I were going to buy a new boat today (and I am not looking to do so at this moment, to be clear), it would seem that the Sailfish would be an obvious choice.  But Scott, who is sort of the opposite of me in his enthusiasm for boat design, had a lot to say that muddied the waters for me.  Like I said, it felt like the Sailfish was gliding very well, but Scott said the Cuda was the better boat in terms of hull speed.  Most of the races I do in my part of the country are on flatwater and easy water, so I do want my boat for these races to have the best hull speed possible.  But I also consider it very important to be comfortable in the boat, and I wasn't feeling that way in the Cuda.  When I was younger, simply logging more "seat time" in a boat was all I needed to achieve a greater comfort level, but I'm finding that less effective now as I approach my 59th birthday.

Anyway... like I said, I'm not really in the market for a new boat at this time.  My current boats are still in reasonably good condition, and having spent a lot of money lately on my forays into the Grand Canyon and South Africa, I'm in a mood to lay low and live simply for a while.  Nevertheless, it was good for me to get out and try something new, and I'm grateful to Scott for giving me that opportunity.  Hopefully in the coming months I'll have more chances to try out some boats and ready myself to make a good informed decision whenever I do spring for a new boat.  I encourage anybody reading this to consider Scott and Venture Sport for future purchases of high-performance kayaks.  The Venture Sport website doesn't seem to be working at this time, but you can find it on Face Book and other social media platforms.

Scott and I camped at Hillman Ferry Campground on the eastern shore of Kentucky Lake, where we enjoyed good access to the water.  We paddled a couple of hours each day on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  The area also has an interesting trail system, and we did a fun, if sweaty, day hike Saturday morning.  We spent some time soaking up the culture of small-town western Kentucky, and conversing by the campfire in the evenings.

Of course, here in the 21st Century every great adventure must be capped with a selfie:

I'm back home in Memphis now, and was back on the Memphis riverfront Tuesday morning for a relaxed 50-minute paddle.  I spent Tuesday afternoon working on a project I've had going for the last couple of months: my 110-year-old house has a lot of interior brickwork that has needed rehab work for as long as I've owned the place, and I've been "tuck-pointing," or scraping out the old crumbling mortar and replacing it with new mortar.

Wednesday morning I woke up with pain in the right side of my torso, and I'm pretty sure it was the tuck-pointing, not the paddling, I'd done on Tuesday that caused it.  I'd been up on the ladder and using lots of elbow grease to press the new mortar into all the crevices I wanted to get it into, and it was just the sort of effort that could strain my oblique abdominal muscles.

Over years of following baseball, I've learned that players who sustain "oblique" injuries often end up missing lots and lots of games, so I knew I had to proceed gingerly in the boat when I went back down to the river yesterday morning.  Sure enough, I was feeling a little stab of pain with each stroke on my right, so I limited myself to just 20 minutes of very easy paddling.  I hoped that some light engagement of the ailing muscles would be helpful in the healing process, and since then that seems to be what's happened: this morning the area is still sore, but not nearly as bad as it was on Wednesday.

Summer begins for real this Sunday, and I'm settling in for a long, hot, and relatively quiet one.

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Monday photo feature

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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I'm still here, I promise

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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Who's ready to get OCEAN FIT?

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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Monday photo feature

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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