Some mild weather fun

The milder weather brought to us by the outer bands of Hurricane Hanna has continued this week.  Most days the Fahrenheit high has been in the upper 80s, the humidity has been moderate, and breezes have provided some relief.

Joe and I paddled a loop of the harbor on Tuesday.  The sky was full of pretty cloud formations--another benefit of this unsettled weather.

When I got downtown yesterday morning there was quite a stiff south wind blowing.  Summertime is not normally a windy time of year here and I haven't been paying attention to the wind forecast website I use, but I'm guessing it was blowing somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 knots yesterday.  As I warmed up and did a set of three 8-stroke sprints, I anticipated some possible downwind conditions out on the Mississippi.

When I got out there, what I found were conditions that were not very big--it wasn't going to be "surf city" or anything--but defined enough to enable some work on my skills.  In some ways I find the small bumps more intimidating than the bigger stuff; the water is choppier and makes balance trickier.  And any run you catch is brief, so you have to keep working to find new ones.

I spent the better part of an hour trying to apply the downwind principles I've learned over the last couple of years in places like False Bay in South Africa and the Columbia River Gorge in the Pacific Northwest.  I was having enough fun that I would have liked to stay out longer, but I had things to do at home, and I could tell I was getting tired and wouldn't be able to do good work much longer, so I returned to the harbor and headed for the dock.  Until the next downwind opportunity...

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Monday photo feature

A group of paddlers gets ready to put in at Miller's Point, where the legendary Miller's Run in South Africa's False Bay begins.  Most of them them are masked: riding in a van full of people is probably the biggest risk to their health in this endeavor.

In any case, I'm glad to see people paddling there.  South Africans were barred from paddling or any other ocean-based endeavors for about three months, and I was genuinely concerned for the people I know there.  The freedom to go out and paddle has made all the difference in preserving my own mental health in Pandemic Times, and I can't even imagine what it was like to live within spitting distance of the Miller's Run and not even be allowed to put your boat in the water.

Eventually the South African authorities began to allow licensed fishermen back on the water, so paddlers started buying fishing licenses and venturing out there as well.  Then the national canoe/kayak federation negotiated an agreement with authorities to make paddling legal once more.


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A nicer-than-usual summer weekend

I woke up yesterday morning and saw the sun rising in a clear sky, and braced myself for another scorching hot day.  But then I headed out to paddle and found that it wasn't nearly so bad.  My car's temperature display told me it was 85 degrees Fahrenheit, quite a few clouds had moved in to keep the sun at bay, and down on the riverfront there was a very pleasant breeze blowing from the south.  I think the humidity was down, too.

I warmed up and did three 8-stroke sprints, and paddled out onto the Mississippi to see what "play" workout opportunities were on offer.  There was a big barge rig coming downriver with its props churning, and the waves looked good.  When I paddled out into them I found that they were wandering all about, but I could sort of detect a pattern to their movement and I tried to position my boat accordingly.  The rides I got were all brief but it was fun trying to link from one wave to the next.

Saturday is the day I usually take all my recyclable trash to the dumpsters down on Mud Island, so I try to pick up whatever floating recyclables I see along the riverfront to add to my household collection.  Yesterday I grabbed eight or ten plastic bottles as I paddled up the harbor back to the dock.  But if my good deed is going to be rewarded, apparently that'll come later: while I was putting my boat away a hornet gave me a wicked sting on the inside of my right ankle.  I'm not terribly allergic to stings but I do get some localized swelling, and the area bloated right up and caused me much discomfort for the rest of the day.  As I write this now, some 30 hours later, the pain and itching have subsided but the area is still quite swollen.

When I got to the dock this morning I took a careful look around to see if I could find the hornets' nest, and finally figured out it was inside my little boat stand that I made from pieces of PVC pipe.  I flushed water through it and beat it against the dock until the nest finally fell out.  I managed to do all this without any further stings.

Adam Davis and I got together today for the first time in a few weeks.  We paddled from the mouth of the harbor across the Mississippi and up into the Loosahatchie Chute.  The river has dropped a lot in recent weeks--today's level was about 8.7 feet on the Memphis gauge--and the current in the Chute was gentle, with some shallow water here and there.  At one point we had to get out of our boats and hike them across a sandbar that was a couple of inches below the surface.  I think the river is generally cleaner at low levels because it's not flooding farmlands and garbage dumps and stuff, and it enticed us into doing some remount practice in deeper water.

The weather was even a bit nicer than it was yesterday.  I'd go so far as to say it was delightful, at least for July.  That lovely south breeze was blowing again, and there was a generous scattering of clouds in the sky to keep the sun from beating down relentlessly.  The Loosahatchie Chute has long been one of my favorite local outdoor spots, and it was beautiful today.

A week ago the oppressive heat was getting to me after paddling for just an hour, but today we paddled almost two hours and it wasn't until the last 20 minutes or so that I was starting to feel unpleasantly thirsty.  I had an insulated bottle of cold water waiting for me on the dock and it capped off a good morning of paddling very nicely.


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An unsettled but not unwelcome weather pattern

I've missed racing this year in that I've missed gathering with like-minded people and testing myself against athletes who take the sport seriously like I do.  On the other hand, I haven't particularly missed the five-, six-, and seven-hour drives and other ancillary chores and expenses in the service of attending races.

I've mentioned the frustrating feeling of being "stuck" here at home all summer.  But when I allow myself to settle in and embrace it, there's something peaceful about going down to my home river and just having fun out there.  With no competitions to be sharp for, I'm sticking to the "play" variety of workouts.

I'm also keeping the sessions short--no longer than 60 or 70 minutes.  That's primarily because of the heat.  Once you're overcome with the oppressive summer heat your form falls apart and your training is not really productive anymore.

Speaking of the heat, we've had plenty of it, but we've gotten breaks here and there, too.  For the last week or so there have been scattered thunderstorms in the region that have cooled things down in the afternoon.  One pandemic habit I've fallen into is sitting out on the back deck and drinking a beer around 5:00 or 5:30 PM, and on many days the weather has been more pleasant at that hour than in the late morning or at lunchtime.

On Tuesday Joe and I did our usual loop of the harbor.  The humid air was stifling and breathless as I readied my gear on the dock, but out on the water there was just enough of a breeze to make our session bearable.

This morning I warmed up and did three 8-stroke sprints, and then headed out onto the Mississippi to see what was going on.  There were three barge rigs moving upriver, the last of which was emerging from under the Harahan Bridge.  I headed for that one to see what kind of fun I could have on its wake.  The conditions were sort of tricky, and they didn't last long, but I managed to get a couple of really nice rides--probably the best since my "dream day" two months ago.  I even linked several runs--not easy to do in the unpredictable world of barge-wake surfing.

As I drove home the temperature display in my car said it was 89 degrees Fahrenheit outside.  As I approached my house I drove into a torrential downpour, and I watched as the reading dropped to 81 degrees.  When I got home the rain showed no signs of letting up, and I got pretty wet running up the back stairs to the door.  The deluge continued for the better part of the next hour, and I'm curious to know how much rain fell here; I'm thinking at least an inch.  Whatever the case, the storm kept the day from growing too hot.

Really, my only complaint about this current weather pattern is that the evenings have been cloudy, and I'd like to get a glimpse of the comet Neowise that's passing near the Earth right now.  I think there are only several more evenings when it will be visible.  Apparently this comet has a period of around 6800 years... I try my best to stay healthy and fit, but to be around the next time the comet shows up might be too much to hope for.


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Monday photo feature

I pay a hundred bucks per quarter to keep my boat down at Harbortown Marina, and it might be the best $400 I spend each year.  The hassle of getting my boat on and off the car every time I want to paddle is one of those subtle challenges to one's motivation that I'm happy not to have to deal with.  I can even ride my bike down there if I feel like it or if I want some extra cardio training.  And it's nice to have a place to spread out and ready my gear before paddling and put it away after.

That's my boat on the top rack in the photo above.  And in the foreground we see a piece of equipment that is, in the summertime, nearly as important.  Taking a bath in cool water from the hose is something I look forward to as I paddle the last 2000 meters up the harbor back to the dock on a steaming hot day.  I keep a bottle of castile soap on the dock, and I come away fresh as a daisy (at least until I've made the hike up the ramp to the parking lot and worked up a sweat again).

I'll just add that there are people who pay a lot more than $400 a year to belong to some spa where they can sit in a sauna and then douse themselves with cold water.  I get essentially the same thing at no addition to the cost of storing my boat at the marina.  And yes, I feel very smart because of that.


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More summertime fun on the big river

Yesterday morning I warmed up and did three 8-stroke sprints in the harbor, and then headed out onto the Mississippi hoping to find some barge wakes to surf.

There was a rig coming downstream that was generating some good-sized waves.  As I paddled out toward them some men on the deck started hooting and hollering at me.  I couldn't tell whether they were cheering me on or shouting at me to get lost.  Then the pilot cut the engines way back, and I began to sense that they did indeed have a problem with me riding their wake.  Then again, it's been my experience that when a pilot is truly annoyed with a paddler's behavior, he'll give an angry blast of his horn or deliver a stern rebuke over his P.A. system, and I heard nothing of the sort this time.  Eventually the engines powered back up, but the waves were wandering back and forth so much that I couldn't get a good ride.  I gave up around the time that I was passing beneath the old bridges below downtown.

Looking downriver I saw another rig making its way upstream.  It was at least twenty minutes away, so I took out below the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge and took a breather and did some stretching.  As the vessel neared the bridge I got back in the boat and paddled up the Arkansas bank a few hundred meters before ferrying out and seeing what I could do.  The waves had a slight confusion to them but after a few tries I managed to get several decent rides.

After some ten minutes of that I was gasping for breath and getting hot under the blazing sun.  I ferried over to the Tennessee bank and paddled up into the harbor, where I flipped my boat and cooled off for a few minutes.  I did remounts from both sides of the boat--I guess one good thing about the hot summers here is that I end up getting plenty of remount practice.

Another hot one was shaping up as I went back out in the boat this morning.  After a warmup and another three 8-strokers, I found a barge rig moving up the Mississippi just out of the mouth of the harbor.  I paddled a brisk pace up the big eddy near the southern tip of Mud Island, then ferried out to try my hand at surfing once more.  Once again I found waves that were not in an organized train, and the water was very confused from the churning of the towboat's props.  I threw in one hard sprint after another but couldn't quite manage a sweet ride, and I had to keep paddling hard to sustain the rides I did get.  But in the end I was satisfied.  One thing I work on every time I surf is reading the waves and trying to sprint at just the right moment: I remember in South Africa having Dawid Mocke behind me shouting "Okay... Go!  NOW!!" and I would try to snap a picture in my mind of where I was on a swell at that instant.  So that's one way I have fun even in less-than-ideal conditions.  And if nothing else, the frequent sprints are a good workout.

I paddled easy back into the harbor, and did some more remount practice there followed by a hose bath back at the dock.

In other news, John Wellens has completed his source-to-sea expedition on the Mississippi River.  It took him 41 days to make the journey from Lake Itasca in Minnesota to the Head of Passes in Louisiana.  That's a very quick trip.  I think several months is not unusual.


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All fun canceled until further notice

I've mentioned here a few times in the past how much I loved going to summer camp as a kid.  I was never particularly happy at the schools I attended, and camp was a chance for me to do some things I had some aptitude for and see people I felt like I could be myself around.  It was also where I became a paddler for a lifetime.

The camp I went to, located in the mountains of western North Carolina, is still in operation.  However, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced it to cancel all its sessions this summer.  I cannot imagine how distraught I would have been if such a thing had happened during the years when I was a camper.

I bring this up now because I'm currently having a somewhat similar experience with the cancelation of the Gorge Downwind Championships out on the Columbia River.  My trip out there has become a cherished ritual for me, and I was really looking forward to being there this week to continue my study of the art of downwind paddling and to reconnect with people I've met out there.  Alas, this event too has succumbed to the pandemic, and I am sitting at home.

I am more skilled at coping with such disappointment now than I was as a summer-camp-aged kid forty years ago.  Life has a way of kicking you in the gut and numbing you to the pain as you get older.  I've basically accepted it with a sigh and a hope that maybe a year from now we'll have contained the virus enough to have an event like that again.  But a touch of melancholy lingers.

It's good and hot here at home.  I expect no less from summer in the Mid South.  Fortunately my current home-improvement project takes place indoors where my air-conditioning system is in good working order.  I'm plugging away at the slow process of tuck-pointing the brickwork in a room of the house.  Recently my lower body has been stiff by the end of each day because I've been up on the ladder, sometimes moving up and down frequently between my mortar board and the part of the wall I'm working on, sometimes standing on the balls of my feet for balance as I reach high up into the rafters.

This week I paddled on Tuesday and yesterday, doing a loop of the harbor with Joe in the former session and pushing the pace out on the river in the latter.  The heat was getting to me a little toward the end of my hour in the boat yesterday.  By the time I was back in the harbor paddling toward the dock, I paused in the shade of each of the three bridges and splashed water all over myself.  Then I took a lovely hose bath on the dock.

I'm not sure of my weekend paddling plan yet, but I expect to be hot regardless of what I do.


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Monday photo feature

John Wellens shot this photo of Bruce Poacher and me as we paddled down the Mississippi River toward Memphis last Monday.  That's Bruce on the right and me on the left.  The conditions weren't really that hazy or misty; John's lens was fogged up with humidity.  I sort of like the effect, actually.

As of this morning John is close to completing the long wilderness section between Natchez, Mississippi, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  To avoid the worst of the withering heat, he's getting started before six o'clock each morning, finding a shady spot to rest for several hours in the middle of the day, and paddling quite late into the evening.


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Making the best of a summer at home

Right now I should be savoring the environs of the Columbia River Gorge.  Should be.

I decided about a month ago that a trip out there for the Gorge Downwind Championships wasn't in the cards for me.  The organizers continued to try everything they could to make the event happen for a much smaller, more local group of racers, but this latest surge of COVID-19 cases proved to be one obstacle too many, and they called it off entirely.

Here in the Mid South, summer is shaping up into its usual self: humid and hot.  This weekend has been pretty bad.  While the air temperature hasn't been as bad is it can be--low 90s Fahrenheit, as opposed to high 90s or 100s--the humidity has pushed the heat index into triple digits.

Such weather has exacerbated a rough patch I'm going through as an athlete.  I'm always tired after I paddle, of course, but whereas it's usually an endorphin-charged feeling of exhilaration, lately it's been an exhausted, beat-down sort of tired.  I noticed it last weekend and ended up taking a break last Sunday.  Then I took a couple of days off after paddling with John Wellens and Bruce Poacher last Monday.  I was hoping I might have some renewed energy by the time I went to the river Thursday, but I still ended up laboring through it.  It was more of the same yesterday.

I got a bit of a break this morning: there were some thunderstorms in the region, and though hardly a drop fell on me, I had some cloud cover and a nice breeze out on the river.  Not coincidentally, it was the best I'd felt in the boat in at least a week.

What exactly did I do these three times out paddling?  Well, I did sets of three 8-stroke sprints in the harbor all three days.  I was hoping to find some barge traffic on the river so I could do some surfing and have fun and get wet, but the river was deserted Thursday and yesterday, and today all I saw was one southbound rig whose wake was too small for doing anything.  What I ended up doing instead was playing around in the eddies below the Hernando DeSoto Bridge's pilings.  The eddies are quite boily with occasional exploding whirlpools, and I did a bunch of S-turn-like moves where I keep my boat moving across the eddies without having to stop and brace or anything like that.  It's an effort to build skill and confidence in the boat.

It sounds like summer will be baring its teeth even more this coming week.  I've heard that we can expect high temperatures in the high 90s by Tuesday.


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Monday photo feature

Joe Royer shot this photo while he and I paddled last Tuesday.  Our hot summers here can wear on a person, but they do give us some lovely cloudscapes.


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Paddling annoyances and paddling epics

I believe pretty strongly that a bad day paddling is better than a good day sitting at a desk or something, but Saturday's session was rather unenjoyable nevertheless.  It's quite common for me to have some stinging in my eyes when I'm paddling with the wind at my back on a sweaty summer day, and usually all I have to do is wipe my eyes and forehead with my hat and the problem is solved.  But on Saturday my right eye was stinging unbearably, and every time I stopped to wipe it with my hat, it came right back within twenty seconds.  Splashing my face with water, turning around and paddling into the breeze... nothing I tried could make my eye stop stinging.

I'm not saying the morning was a complete loss; I paddled for 70 minutes, during which I did a set of three 8-stroke sprints and worked on balance and glide in the boily eddies below the Hernando DeSoto Bridge pilings.  But it was an ordeal of discomfort, and I was grateful to be back on the dock washing my face over and over under the hose and hoping the experience was a one-time aberration.

Throughout this pandemic paddling has been an effective antidote for whatever stress I've experienced in my non-athletic life.  But right now I'm engaged in a home-improvement project that I'm actually feeling good about and even enjoying to some extent.  After Saturday's frustrating exercise I decided to take a break from paddling yesterday and see how much work I could get done at home.  I'm repairing some interior brickwork and it's a long, slow process, and it was satisfying to knock out a good chunk of it yesterday.

For today, I had a plan: I wanted to meet up with John Wellens, a fellow racer from South Carolina who is paddling the Mississippi River from source to sea to benefit the National Alliance on Mental Illness.  I knew from looking at his G.P.S. track that he was starting this morning some 80 or 90 miles above Memphis near Blytheville, Arkansas, so he was likely to arrive at the Memphis riverfront in the mid to late afternoon.  He would have a companion with him: Bruce and Liz Poacher had driven over from Erwin, Tennessee, and Bruce would be paddling with John today while Liz served as their shuttle driver.

I spent this morning doing another round of masonry work, and then around 12:30 I drove to the mouth of the Wolf River.  From there I paddled upstream for four or five miles to the Hickman Bar.  At the current river level (19.9 feet on the Memphis gauge) there was a nice sandy beach along the bar, and I cooled off in the water and watched the river for a pair of kayakers coming down.  I knew I had to watch carefully because it's not hard for a tiny paddlecraft to slip by unnoticed out on the big river.

The better part of an hour went by and I didn't see any paddlers.  I finally got back in the boat and ferried over to the Arkansas side, thinking it might be easier to spot them from there.  I'd spent less than ten minutes hanging out near that bank when I saw them.  I paddled out and joined them, and they seemed surprised at how I'd apparently come out of nowhere but glad to have some more company.

By this time they'd been paddling for about 70 miles and were eager to get to Memphis.  We dealt with some headwinds from a nearby thunderstorm but the mighty river delivered us to our destination in the space of an hour or so.  Liz met us at River Garden Park and very kindly gave my boat and me a ride back up to the mouth of the Wolf where my car was parked.

The website for John's journey is here.  He also has a page on Face Book called "NAMIpaddle."  I encourage folks to check it out as he continues toward the Gulf of Mexico.  I consider it an honor to have joined him for a tiny snippet of the adventure.


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Sweating the days away

Summer is settling into the Mid South for real now.  While the air temperature hasn't risen much above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, the humidity has been oppressive all week.

Looking on the bright side as much as I can, I'll just repeat what I said in last weekend's post about the Mississippi River being as nice a place as you can be in this kind of weather.  This is also the time of year when taking a cool bath under the hose on the dock after paddling is something to savor.

I don't often get excited over products, but I have to say that the insulated stainless steel bottles sold by companies like Hydro Flask and Klean Canteen have been a godsend.  Twenty years ago, when my best water bottles were those plastic Nalgene models, I could bring a frozen-solid bottle of water down to the dock with me, and it still would be almost too warm to drink by the time I'd finished paddling on a hot day in July or August.  Nowadays I bring refrigerated water with me in an insulated steel bottle, and it's still nice and cold after an hour or two of paddling.  Here in Memphis we're lucky to have some of the world's best drinking water, and it never tastes better than in those minutes after paddling on a Mid South summer day.

On Tuesday I got together with Joe to paddle a loop of the harbor.  A south breeze kept us reasonably comfortable.

Yesterday was less breezy, and I went out in the boat looking for ways to get wet.  After warming up and doing three 8-stroke sprints in the harbor, I headed out onto the Mississippi where three barge rigs were moving upstream in close succession.  I paddled toward the last of them to see what surfing opportunities were on offer.  They weren't the easiest waves to catch but I ended up getting a couple of decent rides along with plenty of hard sprints.  The wave train didn't last long: the barges looked empty and I guess the pilot didn't have the pedal to the metal.

I returned to the harbor and did some re-mount practice--that's another very good use of these stifling hot days.  Then I went back to the dock and gulped water and hosed myself down.


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