River and Bayou

This was the last day of my Mississippi River adventure – a two-thousand-mile journey I started almost twenty years earlier when my friend, Rick, and I first put our canoe into the headwaters of the great River at Lake Itasca, Minnesota. The river was barely ten feet wide and four or five inches deep where it flowed out of that Lake. I couldn’t have imagined the changes the river would undergo as it flowed south – how huge and powerful it would become. And how the US Army’s Corp of Engineers had battled (successfully mostly) to harness that power for the nation’s commerce. Having seen firsthand the dozens of locks and dams, the thousands of miles of revetments, and the thousand or more dikes and wing dam used, I think that effort clearly ranks as one of history’s great engineering feats.

I woke this morning before dawn again. Made the last of the coffee, killed and fended off a few thousand mosquitoes, and watched the sun rise for the final time over the waters of the Atchafalaya and the Mississippi. The air was calm. Temperatures hovered near seventy. This was the coolest hour of the day and a heavy dew covered everything. Normally, I’d let the sun burn off the moisture that had accumulated overnight on and inside my tent. But not today. I wouldn’t be using the tent for a while and there would be plenty of time to clean and dry it out when I got home.

My sister, Gloria, was meeting me twenty miles downriver at the Berwick Intracoastal Waterway (ICW) Boat Ramp. Despite the loss of my phone, we still managed to coordinate my pickup by email. Twenty miles is a full day’s paddle, and I told her I’d probably be paddling into the boat ramp’s small harbor sometime between 4 and 5 PM. Hopefully she’d be there waiting for me with a big smile and an ice-cold Coke.

So I loaded up the canoe and paddled out. The Atchafalya gets wide as it approaches Morgan City. And it gets very slow; there was barely a current in the river. Maybe one or one-and-a-half miles per hour. And I still had my own weight and more than a couple hundred pounds of gear in the canoe to push downstream. I could tell right away that today’s twenty mile paddle was going to be a slow slog. It took me almost three hours to paddle the first six miles. At that rate, I’d never reach the boat ramp before 5 PM. But I had an option.

I’d been hauling around my trolling motor and it’s power source, a heavy 12V deep-cycle battery, for almost a month. So far, I had only used it once – for a short one-mile river crossing near Helena while searching for an overnight campsite. But now was the time for my ‘auxiliary paddler’ to show it’s stuff.

So, I lowered the motor into the water and set the throttle to a low speed, maybe three miles per hour. I didn’t know how long the battery would last, but was hoping to get at least ten miles out of it. More would be gravy.

And so I sat back and cruised down the river. Past the river’s tree-lined mud banks. Pass a couple fishermen trying their luck in small unnamed cove. And past a couple boating families enjoying their Saturday afternoon on the sandbar of Little Island. It was my last day on the water and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t relish the small bow wake I was creating.

And so I motored right into Morgan City harbor.

Morgan City harbor is no small thing. It’s one of the key support hubs for all the oil and gas platforms offshore in the Gulf. It’s industrial and very busy. There’s a small boat ramp there for recreational boaters, but I don’t think it’s used much. It just didn’t look like there was much recreational boating going on in the harbor environs and vicinity. And as a barge passed by, throwing up the usual large wake, my motor’s battery ran out of juice. So I paddled over to some pilings under the last bridge on the entire Mississippi River system, the Morgan City Texas and New Orleans Railroad Bridge.

Where I had my final mishap of the journey.

I wanted to raise the motor out of the water and those pilings seemed like a good safe spot to do that. I still had three miles to go to the Berwick ICW Boat Launch, and paddling would be much harder if the motor was trailing in the water.

Now raising the motor is much harder than lowering it, and no small task if I have to do it from inside the canoe. So I was looking for a place where I could land the canoe, get out, raise and stow the motor, and paddle on. Unfortunately, the spot I chose wasn’t a good place to safely land the canoe at all. It was deep all the way up to the loose boulders that lined the water’s edge.

Boulders that my motor promptly got lodged in as the wake from that passing barge pushed the canoe up and down and into them. And with all the waves and rocks, I couldn’t get out of the canoe. From where, no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get the propeller loose from beneath those rocks. There was only one card left to play to free myself from that mess – I had to remove the entire motor from where it was mounted to the canoe! So I crawled back and laid on my stomach across the very stern of the canoe, reached back to loosen the large clamp screws holding the motor to the wood bracket, and lowered and twisted the entire motor assembly in the water until the propeller was free. Finally, with just a few scratches to my hands and minimal damage to the motor, the propeller was free and I was able to re-mount the motor and get it stowed. So with a final catastrophe averted, I paddled on the last three miles, arriving at the boat ramp shortly after 3:30 PM.

And as I was paddling into the boat ram’s small harbor, who do I see pull into the parking lot, get out of her car, and start to walk around looking for me?? Gloria!! We both arrived at the boat ramp at exactly the same time!!! Amazing!! I docked the canoe, got out, and was greeted with a iced Coke, a big smile and a bigger hug. It was the perfect way to end the adventure.

And that was that. I took a little time to stand down, relax a bit, and just talk story with Gloria. Then we unloaded the canoe, loaded it and my gear into the SUV, and drove to a motel where I had my first shower in four weeks. Putting on my clean set of clothes, we went out for a Cajun dinner, then back to the motel for my first night’s sleep not in a tent in almost a month. It was good.

The following morning after breakfast, we started our long two-day drive back home. The travel adventure of canoeing the entire length of the Mississippi River from source to sea was done.