Life on the Mississippi

Sometime last week I met the Sartoris and Joey Heger out at the Chain of Rocks for a surf session.  I hadn't been in my boat since those few October days in West-by-God, so it was good to know the thing still floats.  The Saint Louis gage read 6.5', but I'm still mystified by what we found out there.  Blockhouse was beefy, rookies was dynamic, and Cobblestone was just beautiful.  Primo, however, was completely absent.  (I spoke with my boss and hydrology expert, Bill Eades, about it.  He noted that the water temp that day was around 4 degrees Celsius, the temperature which freshwater is most dense.  I'm still sure not whether a couple extra thousandths of a gram/mL is enough obliterate the dreams of 4 Midwestern paddlers, or not. )

Anyway, the redeeming parts of the day were all about making improbable attainments to get a second helping on features that really should have been "on the fly" only.  First one was at blockhouse.  Really nice foamy hole with green shoulders.  Good for spins and just sitting there sideways.  I washed out trying to cartwheel and was able to work my way back up through these piles of rebar and the trees that were collecting in them.   A little sketch, but not enough current to really make it dangerous.  Then ferried out, dropped in, and did it all over again! :)

Cobblestone was the best of the day.  Big and burly hole, but you could surf that over to a steep glass wave.  Surfing a fast green wave in the centrifuge is just about as good as it gets.  That thing feels like its on rails when you ask it to carve, and ball bearings when you don't.  I love it.  I hollered to Joey to join me, but he washed through.   We worked our way around the shoals and found this remarkable, 7 or 8 move attainment.  We probably started 200 yards away from our target feature - Cobblestone.  And move by move, micro eddy to micro eddy, we hauled ourselves back up so that we could drop in again.  As Joey put it, it was really cool to play such and involved game of chess like that with the river.

Both of us bailed once finally got ourselves above cobblestone.  We were shot from the effort and subconsciously I was too nervous to surf.  I dropped in, but didn't stick it.  Neither did Joey, but that didn't matter.