Had a great paddle on the Paw Paw yesterday, about 3-4 miles upstream and then back. It starts off kind of wide and slow until you get past the golf course. When you hear the sound of a club hitting a ball you need to be alert; I had a ball kerplunk about 30 yards behind me on Saturday.
Nice photos. Do you carry a saw or axe to deal with the water hazards (trees, not golf balls)?
Tom, I too like small rivers that keep you dancing around stuff.
I carry a saw, but some times you have to portage around stuff.
I don’t carry a saw or axe and honestly it would never occur to me. During this paddle there were spots tight enough that I bumped into trees/branches many times. The only other boat that made it almost as far back as me was two guys in a little square stern Royalex boat with a 2 horse motor. Eventually even they got stuck. There seems to be a cult of tiny Zodiacs around here and they will will go upstream if they can get through…so I am not going to help them. I’m associated with a nature center a few miles further upstream and I’m told that when they make an effort to clear their section of the river they try to make enough room for canoes and kayaks but nothing bigger…so in the past I’ve seen lots of 3 foot wide openings made with chainsaws.
Castoff, for me it is absolutely dreamy paddling, almost surreal. The light keeps changing as the river snakes around, you always want to go around the next bend to see what’s there, and there are enough obstacles that you can’t remember the best line on the way back.
So this is the river where a young man lost his life during the late February floods. Can you even imagine an inexperienced paddler going onto this river during a serious flood? How about at night with no PFD?
Tom, the Enoree where we paddle has lots of downfall in the river which are constantly changing. It floods off and on during the year. It’s flow ranges from 200-5,000 cfs. We have cancel 2 paddles this year because of flows of 2,000. A flooding river with sweepers at night without a PFD… did they rule suicide?
Even though there are ramps where we put in there has never been a power boat that I have seen except where they can come up it a way from the Broad River, and only once did we see a john boat with a couple of duck hunters.
We don’t carry a chain saw, and only cut a few small limbs to make it passable for the canoe. I am posting a couple of photos to demonstrate what it looks like.
These are all the same spot. We cut a a couple of limbs so we could pull through the jam. The third photo is what this jam looked like a couple of years latter
Two other methods that don’t require a saw.
The Enoree is a flowing mud puddle.
I love small meandering rivers too, for reasons similar to those already mentioned, and for the visible records of river geology that they provide. It’s fascinating to see things as dramatic as row upon row of natural riverbank levees or bank-side cuts that once were part of the river channel but are now well back from shore or even deep in the woods. Most people walk right over these without noticing a thing, and but there are more subtle traces of former channel locations that are fun to take a little time to interpret as well. Even something as common and obvious as point bars are interesting in that for most of the history of people paying attention to such things, the “known” reason for their formation has been dead-wrong, a working model that still sometimes shows up in textbooks even today (and it’s what I was taught when I took geology half a lifetime ago). It’s fun stuff to see, even for total amateurs like myself. All this, and the speed with which many of the changes happen (I’ve seen so many really marked changes to river channels in the 15 years I’ve been seriously paddling) and that old saying that “you never step in the same river twice” takes on a very different meaning than what we usually think.
Hey castoff, 200-5000 cfs is quite a range! Kudos to you for canceling paddles when Mother Nature is riled up. And the poor guy that died was paddling with two other guys with more experience that apparently decided to save their owns butts when they hit a strainer…they have to live with taking their friend out. On a lighter note I pulled a chunk of plastic out of the river today and thought of you.
@TomL said:
Hey castoff, 200-5000 cfs is quite a range! Kudos to you for canceling paddles when Mother Nature is riled up. And the poor guy that died was paddling with two other guys with more experience that apparently decided to save their owns butts when they hit a strainer…they have to live with taking their friend out. On a lighter note I pulled a chunk of plastic out of the river today and thought of you.
GBG, I have never heard that expression but I could not agree more. You can go to the same place every day and always bring back unique memories. Maybe I should take a geology class to help me better appreciate things I see. Today on the St Joseph I saw this pocket of sand…the river level is finally dropping and I think I’m seeing the aftermath of the spring floods.
On Cast-off’s river that would be red mud.
