Big Raccoon Creek

When his wife told him goodbye and to be careful and not do anything stupid, he stopped and looked her in the face.

"Jeanette", he said "I'm going kayaking on a stream with two other 60-year-old men."

And that was before we saw the water and the threatening clouds.

Well, maybe it is stupid. I had second thoughts when I looked at the put-in site. The water was an angry brown color. It was that color in the eddy showing the tops of tall grasses that would be a low bank on another day. It was brown as it fell loudly over the spillway and whirled around the rocks upstream. The current was faster than anything I've tried before and my second thoughts were becoming primary. I had trouble controlling this long kayak on a slower and easier stream two weeks earlier. I had doubts.

I learned a few things on the last trip on Sugar Creek but not enough for me to make a reasoned decision. In the corporate life I left last year, they have risk assessment meetings before making go/no-go decisions. Kayaking down an unknown stream full of downed trees, after a hard rain storm, when the operators of the Raccoon Lake reservoir were releasing water, would be a no-go in those meetings.

Glad I left that corporate world behind; I pushed off and was downstream but was still not quite sure I wasn't doing something stupid.

Here's the biggest lesson I learned today: in strong current, back paddle to position your kayak so that the current will take you where you want to go. I did not learn this easily. Many times, I dug my paddle in five times or more of right forward strokes when one solid left back paddle would have done the job.

I'm not yet good at deciding where in a stream full of hazardous trees, rocks and shallows I should try to go. For most of the 7 or 8 mile trip, I let someone else lead and I stayed behind. There was one place where I didn't think I could make the sharp turn required to pass between two downed trees so I walked that part. There was another place where I wish I had been that cautious and I learned that Big Raccoon Creek between Bridgeton and Rosedale is 7 feet deep in places and that the water that feeds it from the dam is cool indeed. I also found that the current would help me turn the kayak right side up.

Another thing I learned was that my soft cooler is not water tight and I was glad that Dean was carrying my sandwich in his cooler.

By the end of the day, I became more comfortable in the swift current and I took the lead for a short time.

So that's how my fourth trip on a stream went. I hope I didn't complain too much and ruin it for Bryce and Dean.