An onslaught of wood

I had a chance to do some more barge wake surfing Tuesday morning, as there were three rigs heading upstream on the Memphis riverfront.  I found the waves tough to get on, however.

For the last couple of weeks there has been an impressive amount of wood floating down the Mississippi--tree trunks, branches, and tons of smaller stuff.  While there's not really anything new about such conditions, I this is the longest sustained period of woody debris in the river that I can recall.  Right now paddling upstream or surfing behind an upstream-moving vessel means occasionally having to weave through a gauntlet of logs.  The worst thing is that some of the wood is so waterlogged that it's floating several inches below the surface where I can't see it.  At one point on Tuesday my boat hit a submerged log, stopped dead, and flipped.  I did a quick remount while the pilot of the towboat I was surfing behind was probably marveling at what a goober I was.  And then a little bit later I was paddling up along the Tennessee side and the big surf rudder on my V10 Sport hit a branch that was sticking out from the bank underwater.  The rudder now has a good-sized ding I need to repair.  And quite a few times my paddle hit logs lurking a foot or so beneath the surface.  These are strange days indeed out on that big river.

This morning there was a lot of driftwood and trash floating in the harbor, and at one point I had to stop and dislodge some junk from my rudder.  Once I was out on the river I saw a good bit of driftwood, but maybe not quite as much as on Tuesday.  The river is cresting right now around 26.5 feet on the Memphis gauge, so I expect in the coming days the debris will start to thin out.

I paddled for 60 minutes today.  An upstream-moving barge rig was just above the Hernando DeSoto Bridge as I left the harbor, and I tried to surf its residual waves.  By this time the waves' amplitude was low and their wavelength was long, so I really had to sprint hard to get even a few seconds of surf.  I worked on that for 20 minutes or so before returning to the harbor.

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