Monday photo feature

I'm not doing any racing or any real training these days, but a number of my friends are, so here's a photo I lifted from the Face Book page of my friend Mike Herbert of Rogers, Arkansas.  He participated in the Freedom Race in Missouri on Saturday, and this is what he wrote about it:

Great day to be racing. The Freedom race is a 63 mile trip down the beautiful Missouri River. We had almost ideal conditions with only a slight but persistent headwind with only one barge to deal with. Got the solo surfski win and was 3rd overall behind 7-man Joe’s boat and one good double surfski. Christel shuttled me with Nebo waiting at the finish line!

"Joe's boat" was a 7-person craft led by race director Joe Mann.  The "one good double surfski" was paddled by my friend Scott Cummins, with whom I paddled and camped in Kentucky a couple of weeks ago, and a guy named Jeff Behrns.  Christel?  That would be Mike's wife, while Nebo is another very important member of his family, his dog.  That's Nebo helping Mike celebrate in the picture.

Mike covered the 63 miles (approx. 102 kilometers) in six hours, 10 minutes.  He got some help from the river's flow, but not as much in a previous year when he clocked five hours, 39 minutes.  Even that latter time is longer than I care to be sitting in a boat competing, but like I said, these days I'm not racing and Mike is, so Mike has the right to do whatever he wants.

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A not-so-sunny outlook as summer settles in

This time a week ago I was nursing some strained oblique muscles.  I'm happy to report that that particular ailment seems to be a thing of the past.

Unfortunately, I'm still living with pain and tightness in the right side of my neck.  I haven't mentioned it in a while, so here's a quick history: I arrived home from my trip to South Africa on the 5th of February.  On February 9, I received the second of two shingles vaccine shots, and by the following day I was feeling awful.  For some 24 hours I suffered from severe chills that made me clench into a fetal position as I lay in bed.

By the day after that, I was feeling better.  But the one thing that lingered was the discomfort in my neck, and that condition has lingered, and lingered, and lingered some more.  I sought treatment from my chiropractor, who performed adjustments and some dry needling, but after a few weeks of that I was doing no better.  My chiropractor suggested I get a neck brace to stretch the area, and I did, but after trying that for a couple of weeks I was seeing no change.

I'm pretty sure this is the result of the impinged nerves in my upper spinal cord that an MRI revealed in 2023.  Back then I got a couple of nerve-block injections that had no lasting effect; the next step would have been a surgical procedure that I think would have entailed fusing a couple of vertebrae, but that would have resulted in a loss of range of motion in my neck, and at that time, at least, that seemed worse than what I was already dealing with.

So, these days I'm just living with the discomfort, and I'm really at a loss as to what else I can do.  I keep hoping it'll all run its course and loosen up on its own, but as of now it's showing no signs of doing that.  Will it be with me for the rest of my life?  Hell if I know.  Meanwhile, I'm spending so much time worrying over my 90-year-old mother's condition that navigating the medical care system for my own woes is simply more than I can bear to consider right now.

The neck discomfort is definitely with me in the boat, but it doesn't directly interfere with paddling, so I'm trying my best to find some solace on the water.  There are no big races coming up, so I'm not really training for anything.  It's not like this time last year, when I had a robust fitness program going to get myself lean and mean for a trip through the Grand Canyon.  No, these days my paddling sessions are just mental health breaks, something that allows me to look back on each day and think, "At least one decent thing happened today."

On Saturday I went down to the river and paddled for 50 minutes.  Yesterday I paddled for 40 minutes.  I got something in.  It feels like the best I can do these days.

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Poking along in early summer

I paddled Tuesday morning after a day of heavy rain on Monday.  The water was muddy in the harbor, and once I got out to the Mississippi I found lots of woody debris, including whole trees, floating down the river.  I suspect most of it had been flushed out of the Wolf and Loosahatchie Rivers, as it was all close to the Tennessee bank.

The pain was all gone from my right oblique abdominal area, and as if on cue, there were a couple of upstream-moving barge rigs down below the trio of bridges at the south end of downtown.  I decided I was ready to surf.  The rigs were moving in close succession, so I moved down and fell in behind the second one.  The waves in its train were tall with small, deep troughs, and I confess to being a little spooked by them, but a bit farther back the waves began to smooth out and I was able to get a few good rides.  Once the fun had run its course, I ferried over to the Tennessee bank for the paddle back up to the harbor, and I found myself threading through a gauntlet of sticks, logs, branches, and tree trunks.  I currently have a big surf rudder on my ski, and several times I got debris stuck on it and once I even had to get out of the boat to clear it off.  It all probably added close to ten minutes to my trek back to the dock.

I planned to do a bike ride Wednesday, but my rear tire was flat.  On further inspection, I discovered that the tire's wire lattice was starting to poke out.  In other words, I need a new tire, probably two, since I bought the two tires at the same time several years ago.  So I called off Wednesday's ride, and now I need to make time for some maintenance work.

[Edit: it turns out that what I thought was the wire lattice poking out was actually a small nail that had stuck into the tire.  As soon as my neighbor the Victory Bicycle Studio opens today, I'll go get their expert opinion on the condition of my tires.]

I went back to the river yesterday and, feeling tired in the boat, I was perfectly happy to find no barge traffic out on the river.  I paddled for a relaxed 40 minutes.  After several pleasant days, hotter weather was starting to move in by yesterday.  The forecast is showing Fahrenheit temperatures in the high 90s next week.

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Monday photo feature

My friend Joe Royer shot this lovely photo of Muscovy ducks on my dock at dusk six years ago.

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Ebbing pain for me and some legal pain for a friend

I rode my bike for a little over an hour on Friday.  I hadn't been riding that much lately and it felt good to get back to some of that.

I'm happy to report that by yesterday morning the oblique muscles in the right side of my torso were feeling significantly better.  I could still feel some tenderness in the area once I was in the boat, however, so I limited myself to 40 minutes of easy paddling, and I stayed in the northern half of the harbor, because if I paddled down to the harbor's mouth and saw barge traffic out on the Mississippi, I might have been tempted to go out and surf.

This morning there was again just a hint of discomfort in my oblique as I launched from the dock, so again I kept the paddling to 40 minutes.  This time I did go down to the mouth of the harbor, but there was no commercial traffic on the river, so I was led not into temptation.

In other canoe & kayak news, one of this country's most decorated athletes was arrested next to the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.  Davey Hearn, a two-time world champion and three-time Olympian in whitewater slalom, was out on a bike ride and stopped to have a look at the pool's peeling paint.  When he reached down to touch one of the big loose flakes, National Park police swooped in, handcuffed him, and booked him on charges of vandalism.  The story has been picked up by news outlets across the nation and the world; you can read the BBC account here.  In the 30-plus years that I've known Davey I've never heard him utter anything even approaching a lie, so his claims in the story are perfectly credible to me.  Of course, I wasn't there and I don't know precisely what took place, but I'm happy to offer that bit of character-witness testimony.

It's actually not the first time Davey has run afoul of the authorities while doing little more than living his life.  30 years ago, a few months after Davey had won the second of his two world titles and a few months before he made the second of his three U.S. Olympic teams, the Potomac River rose to flood levels.  While most people looked out over the river and saw danger (and they weren't wrong, I should note), Davey looked out over the river near his home in Bethesda and saw "the perfect wave," and decided to go out and surf.  Before long there was a helicopter circling overhead, and police were yelling at Davey to get off the river.  When he did so, the cops descended and put him in cuffs, and the response of one officer in particular was way out of proportion with what the situation called for.  Eventually a judge dismissed the case, and I hope the same will occur when Davey reports to court on the 9th of July.

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A good weekend getaway and some muscle pain

My paddling friend from Louisville, Scott Cummins, and I agreed we were ready to escape the grinds of our respective lives for a couple of days.  So we met up for some camping and paddling last weekend at Land Between The Lakes.  This National Recreation Area sits between Kentucky Lake, a reservoir on the Tennessee River, and Lake Barkley, an impoundment on the Cumberland River.  It's roughly equidistant from our hometowns.

As I mentioned in a post back in January, Scott is now the owner of Venture Sport, Inc., an importer of racing kayaks from several South African manufacturers.  He brought along a couple of boats made by the Fenn company for me to try.

I've never claimed any great expertise in canoe and kayak design.  To be honest, it's just not an aspect of the sport that interests me all that much.  That doesn't mean I don't consider it important to have a well-designed boat; I absolutely do.  It's just that when the time comes for me to get a new boat, the process of evaluating the available designs and selecting the best one for me feels like kind of a nuisance that I want to be done with as quickly as possible so that I can get back on the water and, you know... paddle.

Over the years I've relied on this rule of thumb when shopping for a new boat: try out a few designs from the most reputable manufacturers, and go with the one that you feel most comfortable in.  My rule might not be especially empirical or grounded in scientific method, but it has served me well enough.  Last weekend I started out in a Sailfish, and I felt very comfortable in that boat.  It was stable but also glided very nicely.  After a while I switched to a Cuda, and I found it much less comfortable, mainly because of its lower primary stability.  The secondary stability was good, and I never really felt like I was going to flip, but I was still expending lots of energy just keeping my balance so I could take good effective strokes.  I should add that there was a great deal of slop out on Kentucky Lake from all the motorized boat traffic, especially on Saturday afternoon, so a fair amount of open-water survival skill was required.

If I were going to buy a new boat today (and I am not looking to do so at this moment, to be clear), it would seem that the Sailfish would be an obvious choice.  But Scott, who is sort of the opposite of me in his enthusiasm for boat design, had a lot to say that muddied the waters for me.  Like I said, it felt like the Sailfish was gliding very well, but Scott said the Cuda was the better boat in terms of hull speed.  Most of the races I do in my part of the country are on flatwater and easy water, so I do want my boat for these races to have the best hull speed possible.  But I also consider it very important to be comfortable in the boat, and I wasn't feeling that way in the Cuda.  When I was younger, simply logging more "seat time" in a boat was all I needed to achieve a greater comfort level, but I'm finding that less effective now as I approach my 59th birthday.

Anyway... like I said, I'm not really in the market for a new boat at this time.  My current boats are still in reasonably good condition, and having spent a lot of money lately on my forays into the Grand Canyon and South Africa, I'm in a mood to lay low and live simply for a while.  Nevertheless, it was good for me to get out and try something new, and I'm grateful to Scott for giving me that opportunity.  Hopefully in the coming months I'll have more chances to try out some boats and ready myself to make a good informed decision whenever I do spring for a new boat.  I encourage anybody reading this to consider Scott and Venture Sport for future purchases of high-performance kayaks.  The Venture Sport website doesn't seem to be working at this time, but you can find it on Face Book and other social media platforms.

Scott and I camped at Hillman Ferry Campground on the eastern shore of Kentucky Lake, where we enjoyed good access to the water.  We paddled a couple of hours each day on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.  The area also has an interesting trail system, and we did a fun, if sweaty, day hike Saturday morning.  We spent some time soaking up the culture of small-town western Kentucky, and conversing by the campfire in the evenings.

Of course, here in the 21st Century every great adventure must be capped with a selfie:

I'm back home in Memphis now, and was back on the Memphis riverfront Tuesday morning for a relaxed 50-minute paddle.  I spent Tuesday afternoon working on a project I've had going for the last couple of months: my 110-year-old house has a lot of interior brickwork that has needed rehab work for as long as I've owned the place, and I've been "tuck-pointing," or scraping out the old crumbling mortar and replacing it with new mortar.

Wednesday morning I woke up with pain in the right side of my torso, and I'm pretty sure it was the tuck-pointing, not the paddling, I'd done on Tuesday that caused it.  I'd been up on the ladder and using lots of elbow grease to press the new mortar into all the crevices I wanted to get it into, and it was just the sort of effort that could strain my oblique abdominal muscles.

Over years of following baseball, I've learned that players who sustain "oblique" injuries often end up missing lots and lots of games, so I knew I had to proceed gingerly in the boat when I went back down to the river yesterday morning.  Sure enough, I was feeling a little stab of pain with each stroke on my right, so I limited myself to just 20 minutes of very easy paddling.  I hoped that some light engagement of the ailing muscles would be helpful in the healing process, and since then that seems to be what's happened: this morning the area is still sore, but not nearly as bad as it was on Wednesday.

Summer begins for real this Sunday, and I'm settling in for a long, hot, and relatively quiet one.

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Monday photo feature

In 2020, Adam Davis and I got together many Saturdays to paddle all up and down the Mississippi River at Memphis.  It was our way of making the best of a global pandemic.

The Mississippi was quite high that spring and summer, providing vast liquid real estate for us to explore.  In this photo, we're nearing the lower end of the Loosahatchie Chute, from which there is a lovely view of the downtown skyline.

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I'm still here, I promise

Well, it's been nearly two months since I last posted something on this blog.  That's as long a break from blogging as I can remember taking since I started this thing up in 2012.  I thank any readers who are still checking in here, who haven't given up on me.

I've had a lot to deal with in my non-athletic life, most notably a sharp decline in my mother's health.  I've been spending much less attention to paddling and all the other things I do.

That doesn't mean I haven't been paddling at all.  I've been getting in the boat four times a week most weeks.  But most of my sessions have been short--40 or 50 minutes, occasionally 60.  It's been feeling like an effort "just to get something in."

But that doesn't mean my paddling sessions haven't been valuable.  Certainly, they're vital to my mental health, and I've been using them to focus on stroke mechanics and other technical matters.

Meanwhile, there's one particular course on my local landscape that I try to navigate at least once a year: a trip around the Loosahatchie Bar.  This image, which Adam Davis generated with his G.P.S. device when he and I paddled around the Bar a few years ago, shows what's involved:

Paddling around the Bar isn't possible when the Mississippi is low, because the Loosahatchie Chute is dry land.  A level of 15 or 16 feet on the Memphis gauge is what I'd call the minimum for a trip around the Bar, but because of a large sandbar up at the north end (deposited in the big flood of 2011), you have to either do some portaging or paddle a lot of extra distance to get around it.  So I like to wait until the river is flowing higher than 20 feet.

The numbers on the image above are mile markers.  Adam started and finished at the cobblestone landing, and as you can see, his total distance was a little over 10 miles.  I, meanwhile, keep my boat at the marina (circled in yellow) a mile or so up the harbor from where Adam launched.  So my total distance for a trip around the Bar is about 12.5 miles.

Besides doing this paddle at least once a year, I have one other goal each time I do it: to break two hours.  I think the fastest I've ever done it is a little under an hour and 50 minutes.  I also sometimes fail to break two hours.  There are all kinds of variables that have an impact on my speed.  The eddies along the Tennessee bank are stronger at some levels than at others, and that affects how fast I can do the long pull upriver.  The higher the river is, the more the northern end of the Bar and the southern end of Mud Island are underwater, and the more distance I can therefore cut off.  A strong north wind slows me down as I paddle upstream, and a strong south wind slows me down in the downstream leg; a strong south wind also creates rough water out in the river's main channel, and that slows me down further.  And of course, sometimes I'm fit or well-rested or otherwise ready to go fast, and sometimes I'm not.

SO... with all that background info laid out, I'll get on with the main topic of this blog post: my circumnavigation of the Loosahatchie Bar yesterday, at which time the Mississippi River was at 20.4 feet on the Memphis gauge, thanks to rain in the Southeast and Midwest during the week.  The wind was just a light northwest breeze and the river was calm, and I was feeling reasonably good, so I figured I could break two hours without too much trouble.

I eased into a comfortable pace as I paddled out of the harbor and headed upstream.  I passed a couple of checkpoints seemingly on pace for a comfortable sub-two-hour trip: I passed beneath the Hernando DeSoto Bridge (at the 1-mark on the image above) less than 25 minutes in, and I reached the mouth of the Wolf River (at the 3-mark on the image above) less than 50 minutes in.

I continued on up past the Maynard C. Stiles sewage treatment plant, and ferried across the main channel in the same place that Adam and I did the day he generated the image above.  That last stretch to the upper end of the Loosahatchie Bar is always a bit of a slog, as there's a lot of current to fight.  I think of it as the paddling equivalent of summiting a mountain peak.  The water was quite shallow up there, and I hit the bottom with my paddle a few times and even dragged my rudder a time or two.  But it was better than having to portage.

There's a narrow little channel, somewhat visible in the image above, that I was able to navigate yesterday, although it was quite overgrown with brush--maybe the result of the river being low for so long this spring.  For a minute I was afraid I was paddling into a dead end, but I found a slot that spit me out into the open Loosahatchie Chute.

I tried to stay relaxed as I moved down the Chute, and let the current do as much of the work as possible.  But I was starting to sense that I'd fallen off the pace a bit.  There are a couple of houses on the river-right bank that I like to get to by the 90-minute mark, and I came a couple of minutes short of doing that.  Then, as I reached the lower end of the Bar and started working my way back into the current of the main channel, I saw a barge rig coming upriver that would force me to make an abrupt crossing of the channel rather than take a more direct line toward the entrance to the harbor.  I looked at my watch and realized I would have to keep the hammer down the rest of the way to have any chance of breaking two hours.

Did I mention that I was getting tired?  Paddling around the Loosahatchie Bar always takes it out of me.  The long upstream leg, the ferry across the channel, the fight to reach the "summit"... it all combines to make this 12.5-mile circuit more like 16 or 17 miles on flatwater.

Paddling from the harbor's mouth back to my marina typically takes me about 15 minutes at a comfortable cruising pace.  Yesterday I had passed the one-hour-47-minute mark when I reached the harbor's mouth, so there would be nothing comfortable about this home stretch if I was going to come in under two hours.  As soon as the marina came into view, I pointed my boat at the end of it where my dock is, and tried to stay locked on that line the rest of the way.  I passed familiar landmarks like the monorail bridge and the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, and these gave me a good idea of the minimum pace I had to maintain.  I passed beneath the A.W. Willis Bridge at about 1:58:30, and I knew then that I would make it... barely.  I kept the boat gliding and reached the dock with less than 20 seconds to spare.

I have now paddled around the Loosahatchie Bar for 2026.  It's possible I'll do it a time or two more; historically, I've gotten it in three or four times each year.  But my goal is to do it once, and now I have.

I was dead tired the rest of the day yesterday, and this morning I knew an easy recovery paddle was in order.  I went back to the river and got in the boat and just tried to relax and enjoy the morning.  Paddling felt labored because of my fatigue, but I knew that doing some easy paddling would help me recover and feel better sooner rather than later.

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

Who's ready to get OCEAN FIT?

The South African championships in surf lifesaving took place last week at Kings Beach, Nelson Mandela Bay, near the Eastern Cape city of Gqeberha (Port Elisabeth).

I've mentioned before that participation in surf lifesaving is a cultural staple in South African beach communities including Fish Hoek, where I was back in January.  It's also popular in Australia and New Zealand, and I believe it's no coincidence that these nations are the cream of the global crop in ocean sports like surfski racing.  My coaches during the camp I attended in January, Dawid and Jasper Mocke, are both many-time medalists in surf lifesaving competition, and their children are well on their way to distinguished careers of their own.  Dawid, who served as a venue announcer at the South African championships, is one of the voices calling the action in the video below.

In utilitarian terms, the main purpose of this activity is to train people for employment as beach lifeguards.  But for many participants it leads to a lifetime of exploring what they can do with their bodies.  In the video, you'll see athletes running both on the sand and into the surf, swimming, paddling surfskis, and competing on boards.  It's not hard to see how a kid who starts surf lifesaving before age ten develops a Herculean cardiopulmonary capacity by his late teens.  I thought about that a lot as I was gasping for breath on the Miller's Run back in January.

I'll point out one more detail: each surf lifesaving club has its own color scheme for the caps that the athletes wear.  Those are Fish Hoek caps in the thumbnail image for the video.

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Monday photo feature

It’s a sure sign of spring: the arrival of the purple martins down at the marina on the riverfront where I keep my boat.  I first noticed them the morning of March 21: that day there were just two, and I think they were “scouts” getting the house ready for their flock.  By this past Friday morning there were at least a half dozen of them here.  (The two visible in the photo were the only ones bold enough to stick around when I approached with my camera.)

The purple martins are one of those simple pleasures I enjoy when I go down to the dock, and I think that's an important part of being an athlete, to savor the little things about the places you go to train.  To like those places.  I genuinely like the environs of the harbor and the entire Memphis riverfront, and I think that helps motivate me to get my paddling in on a regular basis.  Similarly, when I had my little dry-land routine going this past winter, I chose a spot in the Greenbelt Park overlooking the Mississippi River to do it.  The routine felt hard and tedious at times, but I enjoyed being down there and I almost always came away feeling better than I'd felt beforehand.

I think this identification with a place is something accomplished athletes in all sports share.  A dedicated basketball player will probably tell you that he enjoys being in the gym each day, with the echoes of the ball bouncing and sneakers squeaking against the hardwood floor, the popping sound he hears when he takes a shot and hits nothing but net, even the sweaty smell in the locker room.

The more you like the place where you do your sport, the more eager you'll be to get to work each day and make yourself accomplished in that sport.

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Laying low for a while

It's been a fairly light week as far as paddling goes.  I sort of crashed mentally when I got home from Ocean Springs Sunday night, and I didn't paddle for the next several days.  We had a chilly start to the week, and that didn't help my motivation.  I'd originally planned to paddle Tuesday morning, but it was cool and breezy and I realized as I was getting my clothing and gear ready that I just didn't feel like it.  So I bailed.  I paddle because I want to, not because I have to.

Actually, I could have easily crashed this way when I got home from South Africa.  By then I'd been working quite hard for several months, after all.  But I knew I wanted to race at Ocean Springs, so I kept myself going a few weeks longer.  Once that event was behind me, I couldn't ignore my need for a break.

It's also not helpful that my neck muscle continues to nag me.  My chiropractor has been working on it for a month now, but we haven't achieved any lasting relief at this point.  I'm pretty sure this is all part of the nerve impingement that an MRI revealed back in 2023, but I did feel pretty good for about a year from 2024 into 2025, and I'm longing to get back to that.

Finally, I currently have a hospitalized family member, and that's taking up a great deal of my time and attention right now.

By Thursday we were back to some unseasonably warm weather here in the Mid South, and I got myself back to the river for a relaxed hour of paddling.  I did so again Friday morning, when the temperature was in the mid 60s Fahrenheit but dropping toward the 40s by later in the day.

Conditions improved this weekend, fortunately.  It was on the cool side when I got to the river this morning, but the sun was out and the wind was calm.  With the temperature rising quickly toward an afternoon high in the high 70s, it was really a lovely morning to paddle.  I went out and did an easy 40 minutes before returning to the dock and heading back to the hospital.

This might be what I do for the next little while.  For a couple of months after my return from the Grand Canyon last fall, I mostly did easy sessions of less than an hour.  It gave me a chance to focus on technical stuff, and I think it set me up well to ramp the volume back up in December in preparation for the South Africa trip.

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Monday photo feature

Jeb Berry of Gulfport, Mississippi, paddles in the bow seat with his son Thaison just aft.  The pair were the first to cross the finish line in the "Battle On The Bayou" canoe & kayak race at Ocean Springs yesterday.

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Though not perfect, it was a fun return to Ocean Springs

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.

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

Prepping to race despite ailments

My week began with some dry-needling treatment at the chiropractor's office.  The chiropractor warned that I would probably feel worse before feeling better, and that's been the case as my muscles react to being stuck with those needles.  I've been living with this pain in the right side of my neck for close to six weeks now, and it's making my whole body feel out of whack.  Like I've said before, it doesn't directly interfere with paddling, but the discomfort is pretty severe nevertheless... it makes me feel like I'm not paddling well even when I probably am.  I've got an almost OCD-caliber desire for balance and symmetry in all my affairs, and I'm feeling anything but balanced and symmetrical these days.

Meanwhile, I'm signed up to race down at Ocean Springs this Sunday, and I'm trying to go through my pre-race motions this week.  It was cold and miserable outside on Monday and Tuesday, so I took those two days off.  The forecast for Wednesday was a high temperature around 65 degrees Fahrenheit, but it was still in the low 50s when I went down to the river that morning, and a fierce south wind made it seem colder than that.  I paddled into the teeth of that wind toward the mouth of the harbor, and then turned around to do a few 12-stroke sprints with the wind at my back.  I did ten of them at two-minute intervals, and at some point I managed to tweak a muscle in my right lower back.  Wasn't that just all I needed...

Yesterday morning I did some back stretch exercises that I think eased the lower back pain.  I went back to the river and got in the boat, and this time I did eight of those 12-stroke sprints.  The wind wasn't blowing nearly as hard and that helped me feel more comfortable, though the neck pain was quite an annoyance.  It's hard to feel like I'm ready to go out and compete with an ailment like that nagging at me.

By this morning the back pain was about gone, I think.  I went downtown and did six 12-stroke sprints.  When I got back home I tried putting some ice on my sore neck muscle.  It hadn't occurred to me to do so until last night when I got to a part of a book I'm currently reading where the narrator, a doctor, talks about putting ice on a trauma victim's edema.  I figured it couldn't hurt to try it on my neck.  So far I've done it just once, and maybe it's helped a little... hard to tell.  I'll do it once more this evening and again tomorrow, because why not... right?

The plan for tomorrow is to do several more of those sprints in the harbor, and then load up the boat and embark on the six-hour drive down to the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

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

Monday photo feature

It's 2017, and that's me on the right, locked in a tight contest on Old Fort Bayou at Ocean Springs, Mississippi.  Pushing me hard is Jeb Berry of Gulfport, Mississippi.

When I return to Ocean Springs to race this coming weekend, Jeb would likely be my stiffest competition.  Sadly, he was recently diagnosed with an aggressive form of cancer and will probably not be racing (though I know better than to count him out entirely).

The bright side is that Jeb has many friends and they are rallying to his cause.  If you'd like to chip in to a fundraising effort for his medical expenses, you can do so here.

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

Never a dull moment in the aches-and-pains department

My neck continues to be a source of misery.  The chiropractor adjusted it again last Monday, and for the next couple of days I could tell that the discomfort had eased, but by the end of the week it was feeling as bad as ever.  When I return to the chiropractor's office tomorrow, she's going to perform some dry needling in hopes of stimulating a more lasting healing process.

After paddling just an easy 40 minutes yesterday, I planned to do something more substantial today: a lap around the Loosahatchie Bar.  Right now the Mississippi River, at 21.2 feet on the Memphis gauge, is high enough to do it for the first time in at least six months.  (The bare minimum for doing it is around 16 feet, but at that level there's a big sandbar at the north end of the Bar that you have to paddle around, and even then you're either scraping the bottom or getting out and portaging.)

Yep, that was my plan.  But the weather had other ideas.  Today there's a fierce south wind blowing, with some strong thunderstorms and maybe even a tornado or two moving through this evening.  On top of my neck woes, that made it seem unwise for me to be out all alone on the big river.  Paddling around the Bar is something I feel like I ought to do at least once a year, but the year is young, and surely this isn't the only time in 2026 that the river will be high enough for me to do it.

Instead, I paddled for 70 minutes, mostly in the harbor.  I pushed the pace at times, especially while coming back north with the wind at my back.  I did an impromptu bridge-to-bridge sprint for time, and clocked 2:11.  One might think that with such a strong tailwind I should be much faster than that, but it's been my experience that there are limits to that advantage.  When the wind is dead calm I have a smooth surface to paddle on, while with the wind blowing like it is today the surface is very bumpy, and I think those bumps slow the boat down just like bumpy dry-land terrain slows down a car or a bike or a similar vehicle.

After that sprint I got a good full recovery while paddling easy, and then I timed myself over the second half of the bridge-to-bridge course (the approximate halfway point is noted in the video).  In my workouts this winter I've been covering this distance in 64-65 seconds, but this time I wanted to see if I could do it at or below 60 seconds.  I pushed the stroke rate up over a hundred per minute, and reached the Hernando DeSoto Bridge right at 60 seconds.

After that I paddled mostly steady for the rest of the 70 minutes.  My neck ailment, while not directly impeding the act of paddling, continued to make me blue.  I really hope tomorrow's dry-needling session will help me turn a corner on that.

I do have one bit of more positive health news.  If you've read this blog's posts from last fall, then you know I came down with a case of shingles shortly after my return from the Grand Canyon.  I haven't mentioned it here in a long time, and that's because the symptoms were pretty much gone by mid November.  But I could still see remnants of the rash for a long time after that.  Just in the last week, however, it occurred to me that the rash is now all gone.  Well, almost, anyway--there are still faint traces of it.  But I doubt anybody who doesn't know I had shingles could look at it and tell there was ever anything there.

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

I'll be racing again before long

We've had a good bit of rain lately, and that rain has moved across the Tennessee, Cumberland, and Ohio River watersheds, so it's translating into higher levels on the Mississippi River.  When I did a steady 60-minute paddle Tuesday morning, the river was flowing at 15.2 feet on the Memphis gauge.  When I got back on the water for a workout today, it had risen to just over 19 feet.  As of this writing the river is forecast to crest at 21.8 feet next Monday or Tuesday.

I paddled in the afternoon today because of some nuisance stuff I had to deal with in the morning.  With just ten days to go before my race down at Ocean Springs, it was about my last chance to do a workout that's likely to have any bearing on my race-day fitness.  I did four bridge-to-bridge sprints, starting every 8th minute, and clocked 2:14, 2:15, 2:15, and 2:15.  My times were a bit slower than when I did the same workout two weeks ago, and I think the main reason was a light headwind today as opposed to almost no wind then.  I didn't use my cadence sensor two weeks ago, but today I used it and tried to keep things under control by targeting a stroke rate of 90 spm.  I think that helped me stay consistent over all four sprints.

The afternoon's effort has me feeling pleasantly tired this evening.  Knowing that I can cut back the volume a bit between now and race day has me feeling upbeat as well.

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

Sometimes life is a pain in the neck

That nerve/muscle pain in the right side of my neck is a real adventure, and not an enjoyable one.  My chiropractor has adjusted it twice now, last Monday and the Monday before that, and she's scheduled to do it again tomorrow.  Each time I thought I could detect some relief, but as the week wore on the area seemed to settle back into a painful state.  On any given day it's typically felt better in the morning and worse in the evening, probably because I manage to relax while I'm asleep at night but get stressed and tense during the day.

I guess the good news is that I can still paddle; the neck pain makes my general existence unpleasant but doesn't interfere specifically with what I do in the boat.  This past week I got in steady sessions with lots of stroke practice on Monday, Thursday, and today, and performed workouts Tuesday and yesterday.  On Tuesday I did three 8-minute pieces at anaerobic threshold, with 4 minutes recovery.  Yesterday I paddled for 80 minutes total, and for the hour from 0:10 to 1:10, I did five-minute intervals in which I paddled two minutes at 64 strokes per minute, two minutes at 72 spm, and one minute at 80 spm.  In both workouts I was feeling it in my muscles by the end, but my lungs handled the load just fine.

The unseasonably warm weather has continued over the last week; by late in the week we were flirting with record highs for the date.  When I checked the Internet radar yesterday morning, I could see that heavy rain was on the way, so I got myself down to the river early and was in the boat by a few minutes after 8 o'clock.  I got drizzled on a little, but the serious rain didn't move in until just after I'd gotten back home.  The water level, which has been very low for the last five or six months, has been coming up in recent weeks in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back kind of way.  Yesterday morning the Mississippi River was at 4.8 feet on the Memphis gauge, and today it was up to 8.2 feet.  The rain that fell yesterday was part of a large system that moved across the upstream watershed, and by next weekend the river is expected to rise to over 21 feet.

The race down at Ocean Springs is now just two weeks away.  My plan is to continue my preparation and keep trying to find some relief for my neck pain.

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

Monday photo feature

It was brought to my attention on social media that on this day seven years ago, the Mississippi River was flowing at 40.8 feet on the Memphis gauge.  At this very high level, thousands of acres of real estate over in the state of Arkansas are flooded and accessible to paddlers.  In this photo I'm paddling over the Big River Trail, a bike-pedestrian path directly across the river from downtown Memphis.

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Another video from South Africa

I made this video almost two weeks ago, but I'm only just getting around to sharing it here.  It covers a session we did over on the Atlantic side of the Cape Peninsula.

It was Day 2 of our camp, and we were hopeful for some good downwind conditions, but the south-southwest wind we'd hoped for didn't materialize until after we'd finished paddling.  The groundswell, meanwhile, was quite impressive to this guy who lives hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean.  But a Go Pro camera isn't very good at capturing the scale of such phenomena.  So it's hard to tell in this video that we're doing anything that special.  At least the scenery was lovely.

The music is an a cappella version of the Mothers of Invention classic "Any Way The Wind Blows," performed by the Persuasions.  It's an allusion to the fact that we went ahead and paddled even though the wind wasn't blowing the way we'd hoped.

Anyway... here you go.  I hope you enjoy watching this, and if you don't, at least I warned you.

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