Sort of a ho-hum weekend

This weekend we've had some thundershowers in the area that have kept the temperature down a bit, but not the humidity.  It was as muggy as could be when I got to the river yesterday morning.

The Mississippi River is dropping to its low levels of late summer.  It was at 5.7 feet below zero on the Memphis gauge yesterday.  I have a feeling that by mid October the lower Mississippi will be making the national news for its low water for the third year in a row.

My sluggish feelings have continued this weekend, and yesterday I was hoping to find some surfing opportunities out on the river to help me snap out of them.  The reason I think such activity would help is something I've heard Dawid Mocke talk about during my two trips to South Africa.  Riding big swells on a downwind run, says Dawid, prompts the body to produce both endorphins and adrenaline.  The endorphins are produced because of all the hard sprinting one must do to catch runs, while adrenaline production is the body's instinctive reaction when the brain perceives a physical threat to one's person (i.e., a spectacular wipeout).

So that's what I was hoping for yesterday.  But when I reached the mouth of the harbor, I found the river utterly devoid of barge traffic that would produce some fun surfing waves.  So I just paddled a big loop, going down to the old bridges downstream of downtown and back up along the Arkansas bank before ferrying back over to the harbor entrance.  I pushed the pace hard on this ferry, and while it was good to burn some energy, it had the opposite effect of endorphins an adrenaline.  I got back to the dock feeling worn down, and continued feeling that way the rest of the day.

This morning I wandered out into another muggy, overcast day.  The river had dropped to -6.0 feet on the Memphis gauge.  I got back in the surfski and paddled to the harbor's mouth once again, and this time I did find a barge rig out on the river, but it was a small one--just a couple of barges wide and a couple of barges deep.  So it wasn't churning up big waves.  I ferried out and did what tiny bit of surfing I could, and returned to the harbor and paddled back to the dock.  I got in the whitewater boat and did some drills, but no rolls, because the recent thunderstorms in this area had made the water look nasty.  I'd just heard on the radio about the postponement of the Paralympic triathlon at Paris because thunderstorms had elevated the bacteria levels in the Seine River, so I decided there was no reason to try my luck here on the Memphis riverfront.

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