Mississippi Canoe Trip
(Page 6 of 8)
July/August 1970
By CINDY COOPER
With the river maps, the Army Corps sends out all sorts of literature about lock procedure, tooting your horn one mile in advance and waiting at designated spots until given the "go" signal. We naively took these instructions a little too gravely when we approached the first lock on our map of the Ohio River. We conscientiously layed over at the marked area, waited patiently for the "go" signal and tried bravely to reread and follow all directions. It was one hour later and after three motorboats had zoomed over the supposed dam - to our amazement - that we finally discovered the dam had blown out a week earlier (the lock was left standing). Nonetheless, we soon learned the best locking procedure for a canoe.
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First one should paddle up to the bank wall of the lock, which juts out quite a distance from the actual chamber. There you'll find an iron ladder, usually slippery (I made a regular habit of falling into the water from them), that leads to the top of the wall. After a nice half-mile walk, you will discover a lock worker who will tell you what to do next.
Locking takes a minimum of an hour and a half and can take up to a day depending on whether any barges must lock first (they have precedence, but one can lock through with all barges except oil and chemical carriers). There is one simple way to avoid this whole locking mess: Go in spring or high water when the dams are let down!
Portaging - carrying the canoe and equipment across land - is rarely necessary on a trip such as this since most of the waters are navigable. On the earlier rivers (Mohican, Muskingum) we did have to portage five times, mainly across dams that did not have locks or where the locks were not operating (i.e. the lockkeeper was indisposed). On the Ohio, we portaged once at a lock to avoid a long wait. Let me point out, though, that at most of the Ohio locks, this is impossible because the land around the lock is extremely steep and craggy. But if you are a mountain climber as well, on the Mississippi we had to portage a couple of times out of sheer stupidity, usually when we decided to take an "intuitive" shortcut that deadened into a sandbar.
We usually paddled about ten hours a day - or 30 miles on the Ohio and 40 on the Mississippi (the currents varied). Paddling is very simple and it soon became an automatic and subconscious motion.
The stronger, and (hopefully) heavier partner should be seated in the back of the canoe. If the more powerful paddler weighs less than his partner, equipment should be arranged so that more than half of the total load is behind the center of the canoe.
There are merits to both the front and back positions. The back paddler must learn various extra motions, such as the "J-stroke", since he is the one who controls the direction of the canoe. However, he has a more comfortable seat and much greater leg room. The front paddler, who often kneels rather than sitting on the seat, is more cramped, being directly in the bow. On the other hand, he is the less essential of the two and needs to learn only one basic stroke.
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