All hail the mighty Mississippi River!

The weather here has been alternating among warm sunny days, warm rainy days, and cool, breezy days.  Little by little, the warmer days are starting to win out, and that was the case this weekend.  It’s been mostly sunny with temperatures flirting with 80 degrees Fahrenheit.  I typically stick close to the harbor during the winter months, but in warmer weather I venture farther out onto the Mississippi River.

I had a good 60-minute paddle yesterday, going down below the Frisco and Harahan and Memphis-Arkansas bridges before paddling back up the Arkansas side and ferrying back over to the harbor.  All that rain we had earlier in the week also fell in the Tennessee and Cumberland and Ohio River watersheds, and now the Mississippi is on a big rise.  The Memphis gauge reading was 21.5 feet when I paddled yesterday.

By this morning the level had inched up to about 21.9 feet.  Warm temperatures continued, and today they were accompanied by quite a fierce southwest wind.  I'd arranged to meet Adam Davis in the harbor, and with an adequate water level at last, we wanted to do a trip around the Loosahatchie Bar.  It was clear that conditions would be rough out on the river, however, and as we headed from the harbor's mouth up the Mississippi, we left open the possibility of logging our miles up on the protected Wolf River instead.

The going was bumpy with lots of side chop as we paddled upriver along the Tennessee bank.  Nevertheless, I was feeling good about how I was moving my boat, and having a friend with me helped me relax and paddle more confidently.  The water is not as cold as it was a month ago, and that helped too.  When we reached the mouth of the Wolf, we decided to go through with our lap around the Bar.  We continued up the Tennessee bank, and then a bit of a lapse in communication resulted in us getting separated: I started my ferry across the main channel and expected Adam to follow my lead, but he stayed close to the bank and continued upriver.  I made my ferry a slow one, hoping Adam would start his soon.

Once I was in the middle of the river I found myself navigating some small downwind action.  With my attention now fully occupied, I lost track of where Adam was and decided to work my way across a bit faster, and then wait along the opposite bank for Adam to get across and rejoin me.  Once over there I paddled slowly from eddy to eddy, scanning the river for Adam's white boat.  For the longest time I didn't see him, and I rued my mistake of letting us get separated without making sure we knew each other's plan.  Finally I looked way upstream and saw him ferrying across.  Now I had to push the pace to get up where he was so he wouldn't wonder what had happened to me.  Eventually I rounded the northern end of the Bar and found him hanging out at the top of the Loosahatchie Chute.  It turned out that he'd paddled much farther up the Tennessee bank than I'd expected before making his ferry.

We proceeded down the Loosahatchie Chute into a headwind.  In the early going the water there was as rough as I'd seen it (I don't often go over there on super-windy days).  As the Chute widened toward the lower end of the Bar, the water smoothed out.  But once we were back on the main channel angling toward the entrance to the harbor, our boats were pitching and bobbing all over the place as the screaming wind churned the river into a washing machine.  I spent the final approach to the harbor trying to keep my boat moving over all the slop.  Once we were back on protected water, Adam and I agreed that our outing had been stressful, but fun nevertheless.  My paddling year wouldn't feel complete without at least one trip around the Bar, and I was glad to get that in today.

I had a tailwind and smooth water for the last couple of kilometers back to the dock, and I relaxed and tried to close out my time in the boat with good stroke form.  I realized how grateful I am to have something like the Mississippi River to paddle on.  For a mid-continent dweller who wants to be good at ocean-style surfski paddling, I could do much worse for a place to train.  It's not a downwind paradise like the Miller's Run, but it throws all kinds of different conditions at me, and as a result I'm not too intimidated when I do travel to a place like that.

What's more, the Mississippi is to flatwater for paddlers as cross country is to track for distance runners.  There's a wide belief among runners and their coaches that cross country, with its hills and softer turf, builds core strength in a way that running on a track cannot, and so even many postgraduate runners hoping to compete on the track in the Olympics incorporate some cross country racing into their training years.  I think something similar is true of training out on the Mississippi.  Even on a much calmer day than today, a trip around the Loosahatchie Bar includes a lot of upstream paddling and a long, hard ferry.

So let's hear it for the Mississippi River.  I give it a lot of credit for me being as good at this sport as I am with the modest degree of talent I've got.

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