I have yet to paddle a stroke this year , mostly because my paddling partner has overcommitted himself. And other excuses.
This morning has been beautiful beyond words. I made my large cup of coffee and went mentally paddling on the back porch with the dogs and cat.
My view is across the water garden (String Lake) and the neighbor’s yards. Everything is that beautiful early season green . We all have decades old oaks and sitting there is almost like paddling down a river.
The warm sun and cool breeze made it perfect and there were no boats to load and unload.
Tomorrow is our first paddle, hopefully .
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I haven’t paddled yet this spring either. Surface water temp was 46 deg yesterday. I need another 10 deg or so even though it’s flat water and the risk of dumping is near zero. Today it’s 59 deg and raining so that will help some. Fingers crossed for May 10 +/-.
Our local lake is 56 F. Very cool for this time of year.
58° water here, but air temp inland is only about 70°, and cooler on the water.
Through the winter I try to make a habit of stopping by my closest canoe launch and just sit quietly for maybe ten or fifteen minutes and see how the old river is doing through the seasons even if I don’t paddle. I haven’t been out yet this year either, but noticed there are no footprints or drag marks on the beach so I figure few if any others have been out either. Yesterday was the first paddler I’ve seen so far. The road to the landing was flooded in two spots, but not so deeply that I couldn’t get to the river. This is what they were paddling:
https://waterdata.usgs.gov/nwis/uv?site_no=05407000&legacy=1
(Scroll down for the skinny on it.)
No sandbars, darned few landing spots, but a beautiful day if you don’t mind feeling your being flushed down something. I’ve paddled it like that, but its not so much fun that I find it irresistible.
But there is a video that’s a reminder and preview of what I’m looking forward to in a couple days… its a pretty good vid of a great river section that anyone could enjoy.
Like the low rider song “Take a little trip, take a little trip and see”
A non-paddling paddling day.
I paddled for the first time yesterday. On March 28 we were hit by a three day ice storm. Lost power for 18 days and on April 10 Internet went down. That was restored tonight after being out for 18 days.
My woodstove was the only reason I could remain in my home during the outage. My home suffered siding and roof damage and the landscape is littered with twigs and branches.
The forests have been devastated and are filled with broken trees, branches and limbs. It will take years for them to recover.
Ouch - sorry to hear of this. Glad you got through it, though. Wood stoves are awfully nice things to have. Those broken trees will keep it fed in upcoming years. Might as well try to make lemonaid of it. If your place is like mine the wood stove doesn’t do much to keep the basement warm, though. No frozen pipes?
Short winters are about the only thing I like about Mississippi. I paddle most of the year
Yikes! Hope repairs have been going well, or largely done!
Mother nature will recover, one way or another, on her own timeframe.
-sing
I had a nice practice paddle yesterday (on the surfski). Bright, sunny, in the 70s. Barely a breeze. The water was still only 44 degrees though. I had on a 4/3 wetsuit. Did my remounting practice at the end of the paddle. Wetsuit was sufficient for being in the water intermittently before remounting. All in all, a good paddle day. I was the only paddler/person out on the water at that point.
When I finished loading up and changing out of my wetsuit, someone drove up and parked next to me. He had a 12 foot rec boat on top of his nice, new Audi sedan. Big guy (compared to me) who was able to just lift and carry his boat from the car to the water’s edge. He then took his paddle, PFD and bilge pump to the boat. After that, he moved his car to another spot and I drove off. I hope he was going out with more immersion wear than the cotton T shirt and shorts he was wearing… Would be a bad paddle day if he were to go over.
-sing