Nice snarky answer that shows you know nothing of ocean paddling. We have this phenomenon of fog. It can influence leaving times… Its not much fun to paddle in fog with working lobstering boats around so sometimes we do have to wait till it clears and the tide is sometimes then contrary .
Or the tide is incoming with an offshore wind making high waves slowing you down.
Sometimes your weather radio alerts you to the storm that you expected to arrive Mon night when you are ashore and packed up is undergoing bombogenesis and you better leave at three am against a contrary tide.
All has happened… And the tide tables are meaningless. The only thing that matters is tidal currents ie in Eldridges book. There is always a lag between slack tide and slack current.
I agree that in a simple tidal world you should plan to “go with the flow”, but you have to consider the interaction of wind , tidal currents and fog
As string notes, winter is over. Outside my window its drizzling and maybe has gotten up to 50 deg… all of which reminds me of an early season trip I once took with a very experienced paddler I know who once called me up to say she was passing through the state and, did I want to do a short paddle? Well, sure…
There’s an easy little river sorta’ near by that flows through steep cliffs and beautiful wooded hills that in early season are bedecked with early season wildflowers and, if caught at the right time, still has some frozen seeps and springs along the way. Eye candy. We picked a 22mi or so stretch that I’ve done many dozens of times in all seasons. A pretty easy paddle, though a bit on the long side for a season opener, I suppose. But well within our capabilities. The spring high water had passed and there had been no major floods the previous season. All the places where we might have found someone who had been down the river were still closed for winter. The weather was much as it is now outside my window.
The first half of the paddle went beautifully. We ate lunch and the light drizzle turned to light snow. Perfect early season day really. We were prepared for it. After lunch we proceeded around the first bend downstream and were immediately confronted with a strainer that must have been two stories high. I don’t know how many trees were in it, but there were several. We poked and plotted and found a way around and through, avoiding deep fast current, though the work-around involved wading and some deep mud. All part of the fun… though we noted there were no other footprints or broken twigs - we were the first through it this season apparently. Long story short, we encountered a dozen more such strainers in the remaining 11 miles. Almost every turn had one - some smaller, others not, many with cliffs and/or steep muddy banks to deal with. That all took us a while.
I don’t know that “suffering needlessly” was exactly what we did that day, but we definitely earned those last 11 miles. It was longer than either of us were expecting and I don’t mind saying I was tuckered out at the end of it all. I’ve certainly done many easier 35 mile days. Other than staying home, I don’t know how we might have prevented it though. That’s just the sort of thing that makes paddling adventurous sometimes. No sunburn, poison ivy, or mosquitos, though.
distance is always just one factor on a trip. Sometime it is the critical factor that makes or breaks the day or trip but weather, wood, and degree of difficulty have also changed how a trip went. Many a day I’ve looked forward to the take out/campsite.
Often I’m the one organizing the paddles. Usually it is just a post on a message board but as soon as you make it open invitation then I start to feel a bit responsible. If I’m doing something semi-public (club forum, facebook group) then I usually get the basics right- trip distance and time, difficulty, and try to give some general sense of conditions- drysuit required, good current, etc.
Last weekend It felt good crashing someone else’s party- not being responsible for shuttle, head counts, lead and sweep, making sure everyone is good to go. Basically I just had to take care of myself last weekend. So even though I was part of the s##t show I chuckled because I hadn’t created it.
There were a lot of signs that the day was going to be a s@@t show. The original organizer had to bow out due to family concerns. The person who stepped in hadn’t done the river in 20 or 30 years and hadn’t planned on doing that stretch of river that day. We had to google for directions to the put in and take out. At the takeout (where we went first) it was readily apparent the river was low. We started from the put-in and we were immediately scraping over rocks. The shuttle was way longer than 3 or 4 miles (so I’m thinkin’ in the car the river is probably a lot longer) . I think for me the real surprise was just how little water was released from the dam. I had even been told that the releases vary and that it wasn’t a recreational but rather a power generation release. i just hadn’t conceptualized 11 miles of paddling with having to get out and drag over sharp ledges from the initial description of the trip- “scenic float on a dam release”. I have certainly done a lot worst- but on this day it was just unexpected.
I’m not much of a distance paddler. Occasionally I’ll paddle 20 + miles in day but my norm is 5 or 6 miles. Only 4 or 5 hundred total miles in a year. On my really tough days I’ve only made it 5 or 6 miles- those days often involved a lot of wood/portaging. Available daylight becomes a stress factor.
On a normal day trip I like about 3 or 4 hours in a boat. Often I’ll boat several days in a row so I want to leave somethin’ in the tank so I can paddle again the next day. If I practice rolling or swimming, or tow swimmers and plowing boats to shore then I’m more worn out. Sometimes I’ll play or practice myself into exhaustion. I’m still lickin’ my wounds from last weekend- got a sore foot- wore neoprene booties because for the cold water dam release- wasn’t a good choice for dragging the boat.
Willowleaf I totally respect the Cheat- especially at high spring levels- and Colesium was reportedly harder to run before the massive flood which rearranged it a bit. Your friends/group weren’t really thinking about you.
One good thing about getting older- I seem a bit more in tune with the needs of others and less worried about getting my own excitement on any given day…but I’m still not done with suffering needlessly…
That flood was about 11 years after my newb run on the Canyon. I did a backpacking trip up the Red Creek valley (one of the main Cheat feeders) about a month after the “Election Day Flood” of 1985. The remnants of the destruction from that storm were mind boggling. Friends of mine had owned an old house they used as a weekend cabin in the floodplain below that creek that was swept away in the flood and the guy who lived next door died when his house was also demolished. We could see in the steep gorge of the Red that the waters had scoured the walls 20 to 30 ’ up, entire sections of the trail had been swept away and the whole channel was changed, with new sand bar islands covered with massive up-ended tree rootballs in the middle of the newly divided stream. My hiking buddy and I both wished out loud we could have been in some safe location watching that torrent come through. The area had changed so drastically from when I had last backpacked there, 3 or 4 years before. It went from being a narrow forested valley with a well organized and established stream bed to looking like the chaotic outwash of a receding alpine glacier, with huge walls of sorted boulders and sand with deep and raw edged channels, scoured of silt down to bedrock and valley walls that had been stripped of trees and brush by the water.
I had not heard that the '85 flood had also made big changes in the Cheat, but that isn’t surprising.
Sh*t show planning is pretty much the reason I don’t do “school trip” ww paddles anymore, and strictly stick with 2/3 regular partners. Of course, power authority releases are always a municipal free-for-all, but I’d have to be pretty hard-up not to privately set my own shuttle. To paraphrase Groucho: “I wouldn’t want to join any paddle clubs that would have me as a member.”
Yours is a case I’d deem, “Even a bad day on the water, beats…”
Commend yourself for going the extra 8 miles.
As to fishermen, they’re only a problem when I paddle. When I fish, they’re brethren who share information.
Attached is a pic of a hydro electric connected run, I paddle at least twice a year. Apart from this ugly brick aqua spouting edifice and it’s surrounding dynamos, the stream is quite beautiful with remote forest scenery lining the banks.
Many ww paddlers I know can’t be bothered running it at “one tube” (as it appears here pictured) because one tube usually means about 4/5 hours of Class 2 +/- …A very pleasant but not challenging enough run for the intrepid. I myself, make no such biases. If there’s flow, I go.
On the other hand, two tubes brings things up to Class 3. And one day last August, which I was fortunate to paddle, there was extra h20 released that took things up to Class 4. This was due to the power authority making up for missed releases that ceased during the height of the pandemic. Lucky me and my partners, as we were just over joyed and ecstatic to only discover this extra volume after our hulls hit the water.
Forest Gump point: Whitewater is like a box of chocolates. You never know what…
