I felt sluggish and unmotivated as I headed down to the river yesterday. The weather, overcast and muggy, wasn't helping.
I stretched slowly on the dock, eased myself into the boat, and headed south toward the mouth of the harbor. I could see it raining down on the South Bluffs, and eventually the rain moved up to where I was. That was okay with me: if it's going to be humid anyway, why not push it up to a hundred percent?
After a set of 8-stroke sprints, I headed out onto the Mississippi, and through the rain I could make out a barge rig moving upstream beneath the Harahan Bridge. I headed for it with the hope that some surfing could get my juices flowing. But the waves were a weird shape and proved very difficult to catch. I never did get a full blown ride where I could stop paddling, but several times when I kept sprinting hard I got some aid from the waves, even hitting 6 miles per hour a couple of times (going against the current on the Mississippi River, that's pretty fast).
Eventually the waves died down and I headed back to the harbor. By now I was feeling much more energetic in the boat. It's remarkable how good a remedy some hard sprints can be for lethargic feelings. You could say they jump-started my engine, or primed my pump, or whatever other silly metaphor you prefer.
Some heavy showers had moved through while I was out on the river, and as I paddled back toward the dock water was gushing from the storm drain outfalls along the bank. I could see many plastic soda bottles and other floatable trash tumbling into the harbor. Anything we leave on the ground will find its way to the river eventually.
Shortly after I'd reached the dock, the heavens really opened up. The rain on the marina's steel roof made a deafening roar. By this time I'd changed into my dry clothes, and I now stood there waiting for a break in the rain so I could run up to the car without getting drenched. I cooled my heels for close to a half hour before it let up enough for me to make a run for it, and I still got pretty wet.
By this morning the precipitation had moved out, but the sky remained overcast. I did a round of the strength routine at the house, then went to the riverfront and warmed up and did another three 8-strokers, and then paddled out onto the river to see what was going on. There was no barge traffic in sight, and I decided to do an up-tempo paddle for an hour or so. I ferried over to the Arkansas side and paddled up into the Loosahatchie Chute, whose surface is more sand than water at this morning's level of 1.5 feet on the Memphis gauge.
I paddled up the channel of water near the west side of the Chute, thinking at some point I'd find a route through the sandbars to the east side and get back over to the main river. But it had been a long time since I'd been up here at such a low water level, and apparently the sandbar configuration had changed or my memory was faulty, or both. Finding no water on which to work my way eastward, I finally got out of the boat and started hiking across the sand. What I found was that while there is still a deeper channel on the east side of the Chute, there was not enough water today for it to be paddleable. So I had to trudge southward toward the lower end of the Loosahatchie Bar, and there I finally found deep water connected to the main channel.
By now there was a barge rig coming down the river, so I paddled onto its wake to see what I could get. The towboat was following an arcing path through the eastern span of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, and because of that the waves had a lot of lateral movement to them and it was hard to keep track of the sweet spots. But I did manage to get several decent rides, and I tried hard to keep my "nose in the hole," as Dawid Mocke likes to say, and sustain each one as long as I could.
When I reached the mouth of the harbor I said goodbye to the waves and headed back toward the dock. My unplanned portage across the sandbars had added at least a half hour to my intended time in the boat, but I had nothing pressing scheduled for the rest of the day and was glad to add a bit of surfing to the strong-paced paddling I'd already done. I drove home feeling pleasantly tired and pleased with the pretty good weekend of paddling I'd put together.
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