More flood paddling

As the weekend arrived, the Mississippi River was reaching its crest at 37.2 feet on the Memphis gauge.  The official "flood stage" here is 34 feet, at which bottomland areas begin to flood significantly.  When Adam Davis paddled Friday morning, his G.P.S. device generated a rather interesting map of his route:

No, Adam's boat is not equipped with hovercraft technology.  The areas that appear as dry land in this image are currently underwater.

I was in a mood to paddle something similar to Adam's route yesterday morning.  I didn't want to paddle more than 70 minutes or so, so I stayed south of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge (Interstate 40) and just did a loop across that big swath of bottomland there.  My biceps and triceps were sore from the new strength routine I'd started up Friday, but once I got warmed up I paddled pretty comfortably.

Adam and I got together to paddle today, and we ended up doing something pretty similar to what Adam did on Friday: we started out going downriver below the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge (Interstate 55), then worked our way back up north of the HDB and into Dacus Lake before returning to the harbor.

Today was a lovely sunny day.  Such has been hard to come by so far this spring, but as I noted a few days ago, nice days are becoming ever so slightly more frequent.


For more information on what this blog is about, click here.