Jeff Wunrow: Day 13 (9/25/20)

83 barges in One Mile!

Start: River Mile 898

Finish: River Mile 872

Day Total 18 Miles

Segment Total: 361 Miles

Our camp on New Madrid Riverfront Park was a peaceful place to spend the night. There was little overnight Barge traffic, which makes for a good nights sleep. A high dew point allowed us to pack up our tents and other gear dry, something we’ve not had the pleasure of this segment.

Today was a mile stone for me on the Mississippi, I was packed and in my loaded boat before Jon! I’m pretty sure he gifted that to me, but hey, I’ll take it! I have to say, the first mile was tough, my shoulders were very tired and sore. I’ve learned that the only way to loosen them up is to paddled and I higher cadence with high blade pressure. It’s uncomfortable for the first few minutes, but after that I’m loose and pain free.

Jons lovely wife Lesley is driving down from Bloomington this evening so in order to be in the town with a Motel, we made Day 13 a shorter paddle which I very much enjoyed. The good news, we were off the water by noon. The bad news is we were 4 miles away from our Motel. Originally we were going to have the Motel send a car over to haul our gear and then we’d find a place near the landing to lock our boats. Well, once we got to the landing it was obvious there would be no place to stash our boats.

Jon was able meet a local Folks that were very willing to help. Glen and Mike Hopper were awesome. Mike actually drive home to get his trailer, which was big enough to hold both our boats and all our gear. Glen shared a bag of fresh picked tomatoes from his garden. Once we had everything loaded on Mike’s trailer we drove over to the Reelfoot Lake Inn where we had rooms for the next two nights. Mike shared his contact info with us so we ended up having him help us get the boats back to the Tiptonville, TN landing for our morning launch.

Mike had suggested a local fish called Boyette’s Resort, which was a 1.5 mile walk from our Motel. Boyette’s is a 100 year old family style restaurant featuring local caught fish. I had the “Seafood” special with Catfish, shrimp and frog legs. Wash that down with a cold beer in a frosted mug and I don’t think you could ask for more.

The explanation for the title of todays post is this. About 8 miles into our day, we encountered 3 large barge tows all in a one mile stretch of river. One tow was 6 wide and 7 long, one was 5 wide and 7 long and the last one was 2 wide and 3 long. That’s 83 barges total!

It was great having the afternoon to get caught up on laundry, getting gear dried out and organized. Even though I get started on my blog post afternoon, I ran out of time and energy to finish it. My apologize to the several readers for my delay!