I offer up this week's photo feature just in case anybody's curious to know more about where I paddled yesterday. The ribbon of water in the right portion of this image is the harbor. The marina where I keep my boat looks like a little equal sign just north of the A.W. Willis Avenue bridge. Yesterday's destination was a body of water known locally as Dacus Lake, although here it's labeled as the Hopefield Chute. There it is in the left half of the photo.
I paddled south to the mouth of the harbor, then paddled up the main Mississippi almost to the Hernando DeSoto (Interstate 40) Bridge, then ferried across the river, then paddled up to the little channel through the woods connecting Dacus Lake (Hopefield Chute) to the main river. I paddled up this channel until--voila!--I was on Dacus Lake (Hopefield Chute).
It's only possible to paddle from the main Mississippi onto Dacus Lake at high river levels. That's because there's a private road crossing the connector channel, with only a small culvert for the water to flow through beneath it. The river needs to rise to around 30 feet on the Memphis gauge before this road is deep enough underwater for a paddler to get over it. Yesterday's level was about 33.0 feet, and I was able to paddle through with no trouble at all.
There's one other detail on this map that strikes me as interesting: although I always think of myself as being in Arkansas whenever I paddle over to the far side of the river, Dacus Lake (Hopefield Chute) is actually in the state of Tennessee. While the Mississippi River is the official boundary between Tennessee and Arkansas, the state line was demarcated at a time when the river's main channel was to the west of where it is now. I guess that means that when I do a loop around the Loosahatchie Bar (the big island in the middle of the main river), I never actually leave Tennessee. So very peculiar...
For more information on what this blog is about, click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment