The "Battle On The Bayou" canoe & kayak race takes place each March on Old Fort Bayou at Ocean Springs, Mississippi. The inaugural event was in 2010, and it's happened every year since except 2020, when it was called off in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. That made yesterday's race the 16th installment of the event. I missed last year's race, but have attended all fifteen of the others.
Coming into yesterday's race, I had been the overall winner only three times, most recently way back in 2014. There's almost always been somebody there to give me tough competition for that honor. Yesterday my main challenger appeared to be a tandem boat paddled by Gulfport, Mississippi, residents Jeb Berry and his 16-year-old son Thaison. I mentioned in last week's photo feature that Jeb was recently diagnosed with cancer of the colon and liver. He began his treatment just last week, and decided that he was feeling good enough to go ahead and race. He seemed hale and hardy when I spoke to him before the race and I knew I couldn't take him lightly.
After the pre-race meeting I got in the boat, did some warmup paddling, and settled onto the starting line. As I sat there with some five minutes to go, Jeb and Thaison paddled into the starting area, and I knew they would have to move quickly to get their long tandem boat turned around and into position for a fair start. Before I knew it, the starting official gave us the 30-second warning, and what seemed like less than 30 seconds later, the starting horn went off.
I wasted little time getting my boat up to speed to put some distance on the pack in the opening meters. I glanced right and left, fully expecting to see the Berrys nearby, but they were nowhere in sight. They must have not been in ideal position when the race started, I thought, and I was a bit concerned because I wanted our competition to be fair. But I told myself to worry about my own self and I continued working to move my boat as quickly and efficiently as possible, knowing that they were entirely capable of reeling me in over a 70-minutes-plus race.
I paddled hard but mostly relaxed as I covered one kilometer, then two, then three. All the while I kept my ears open for the sound of Jeb's voice or any other clue that I had company up at the front of the race. There was plenty of race still to come, but once or twice I dared to think that maybe this was the year I would finally claim another overall title here in Ocean Springs.
Then, about five kilometers in, those hopes went down the tubes.
Old Fort Bayou is a narrow creek that meanders through a broad swath of marshland as it approaches its mouth in the Back Bay of Biloxi. There is one spot on the race course where it is very easy to make a wrong turn. Here's a satellite image of that spot:
That's Bayou Talla coming in from the north. The green arrows show where racers are supposed to go, and the red arrows show the wrong turn that is so tempting to the unwitting paddler.
I have now been that guy three times. In the 2021 race I was one of about four boats in the lead pack, and when we reached this part of the course I started to make the turn indicated by the red arrows. Fortunately, one of the other boats in the pack was a tandem paddled by Jeb Berry and Ocean Springs local Nick Kinderman, and Nick alerted me to keep going straight. Tragedy averted.
The very next year, I was sitting in second place overall, a minute or so behind the father-daughter tandem of Mike and Savanna Herbert of Rogers, Arkansas. They made the red-arrow mistake, and I followed them. When I rounded the little sliver of island in the middle, the Herberts were paddling back toward me, and I knew we had screwed up. Happily, we managed to get back on course quickly enough that the final results were what they probably would have been anyway: Mike and Savanna cruised to a comfortable victory, and I took second place overall.
That brings us back to yesterday. It's easy to sit here and look at the satellite image and think, "Well, DUH... just follow the green arrows!" But down at water level, the right way to go is anything but obvious. Yesterday I was all by myself in first place, with nobody around to guide me, and certainly not any green arrows painted on the surface of the water. What's more, at that time of morning the sun was right in my eyes, making the correct route look like a possible dead end. And so I made the infuriatingly-easy mistake. The race organizers really ought to post a person there to keep racers on the right course--not just a buoy, not just a sign, but a person. They have never done so, and all I can say is that unless they do, wrong turns will happen here again.
I had about reached the end of that last red arrow when I heard some voices yelling at me. I believe it was the Berrys, who had spotted me through the little passage marked "A" on the satellite photo. I looked around and saw another paddler, Don Hicks of Cabot, Arkansas, who had followed me on my march to folly. At this moment I could not see the slot marked "A," and I thought the only way to paddle back on course was to go back to the beginning of the red arrows. I took a gamble and paddled over to about where point "B" is marked, hoping maybe I could portage over the marsh to the race course. But I couldn't get a visual on just how much ground I would have to cover, or if I could do so without sinking ankle-deep in mud. By this time Don was paddling toward the "A" slot, so I got back in the boat and followed him.
By the time I was back on course, somewhere between ten and twenty boats had overtaken me. I figured running down the Berrys was probably a lost cause, but I felt pretty certain I could still take everybody else. The challenge now was to stay calm and be patient, and not try to put the hammer down and catch everybody right away. I still had some 60 percent of the race left to go, after all.
Little by little, I worked my way up through the field. I rounded the big island by the Fort Bayou apartments and entered the second half of the course, retracing the route back to where we'd started. Along the way I saw familiar faces: Nick's wife Kelly Kinderman; Karen Kesselring of Hot Springs Village, Arkansas; Billy Howell (friends call him "Chilly" Billy) of Coahoma, Mississippi; Robert Brooks of Biloxi, Mississippi; double surfski paddlers Nova Cross and Nate Payne of Ocean Springs; the Gulfport outrigger C2 team of Penny and Lynn Sanburn.
Off in the distance I could see the last person, other than Thaison and Jeb, still in front of me. It was Don Hicks, and that made sense, seeing as how he'd been the next-fastest paddler behind me when I made my wrong turn. He had a good lead, but I could tell I was whittling away at it. I set my sights on him and finally pulled onto his wake as we passed beneath the Washington Avenue drawbridge, about 1300 meters from the finish. I rode his wash for several minutes to gather myself for a strong final surge.
With 700 meters to go, I dug in and pulled away. I could see Jeb and Thaison paddling their post-finish cooldown as I sprinted the last several hundred meters. I crossed the finish line with a time of one hour, 13 minutes, 47 seconds, and it turned out that was just a little over two minutes behind the Berrys (1:11:30).
Don finished the race 28 seconds behind me. A short while later Team Sanburn crossed the line with a time of 1:15:23.
The fastest solo female finisher was Kim Arnold-Bridwell of Gulfport. Her time was 1:23:47, two minutes and three seconds faster than Karen Kesselring.
The complete results are available here.
My G.P.S. device measured the course at 12.27 kilometers. My best guess is that I added two to three hundred meters to my distance with my red-arrow blunder, so I would say the course is about an even 12 kilometers. That's not quite seven and a half miles. The course, altered slightly from what it had been in previous years, had been advertised as "8-ish" miles.
Looking back, I'm satisfied with how I did. It feels good to have come back to take the title among solo paddlers after going off-course and wasting four or five minutes. I'm just sorry I didn't get a chance to compete with the Berrys for that overall title. I expect they're sorry about that as well. But I hope they can savor their victory, especially considering the off-the-water challenges that Jeb faces in the coming months. (Once again, I hope folks will consider helping out with his expenses by chipping in a few bucks here. Even with insurance, having a serious illness is an expensive state of affairs.)
The weather was beautiful, and I enjoyed visiting with friends before the awards were handed out. Once all business was concluded I set sail back north to my humble hometown on the mighty Mississippi.
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