Coping with January

Roscoe Feild's funeral was scheduled for one o'clock on Thursday, so Joe and I got down to the river early to paddle for about 80 minutes.  The big news of the day was the approaching snowstorm, and as we paddled we could detect the intensifying wind out of the north.

But Winter Storm Jonas let us off with little more than a dusting.  When I woke up Friday morning there was a thin coat of snow and ice on the streets outside, and with a daytime high of about 36 degrees Fahrenheit the streets were completely clear by the end of the day.

So getting down to the river yesterday was no problem at all.  But it still was not an especially nice day to paddle.  The north wind continued to blow over ten miles per hour, and even though sunshine  was predicted the sky was full of clouds at the time of day I was down there.  I paddled for 40 minutes, staying in the northern half of the harbor where the wooded banks offer some protection from the wind.  I did three 8-stroke sprints and some backpaddling, and otherwise tried to maintain a good strong tempo.

Today was much nicer: plenty of sun with a breeze from the south, and a Fahrenheit temperature that rose from the high 30s into the low 40s while I was down there.  The river was the calmest I've seen it in quite a while, and I was tempted to ferry over to the Arkansas side and check out the drainage channel from Dacus Lake, which should be flowing heartily now that the river has dropped some 20 feet in the last couple of weeks.  But on these winter days I try to stick a little closer to civilization in the interest of safety, and I resisted the impulse and paddled up to the mouth of the Wolf River instead.

I pushed the pace pretty hard up there, and my elapsed time from leaving the dock to arriving at the Wolf was about 47 minutes.  I think the fastest I've ever done it is a bit under 45 minutes, but anything under 50 isn't bad.  Wearing the same outfit I'd worn in colder temperatures all last week, I had worked up a major sweat by the time I got up there, paddling in the bright sunshine with the wind at my back.  Even though I'd had my normal consumption of water since getting out of bed this morning, I felt a bit dehydrated.  So I eased up on the intensity going back down to the harbor and up to the marina.