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Nuns with paddles

Lake Loudon sunriseIt’s so dark I don’t see the nun buoy until I’m a few feet away. How odd. The red, nun-shaped marker on Parks Bend conjures an instant flashback to angry Sister Mary Library chasing me and Doug Hamilton around book shelves with a paddle, hoping to put a hurtin’ on us after we’d glued alarm clocks under all the library tables at St. Anselm High School. The clocks were set to go off at 2 minute intervals. Sister Mary Library turned her wrath toward me and Doug as the library erupted into something akin to the beginning of Pink Floyd’s “Time.” I guess our howls of laughter gave us away.

I paddle past Sister Mary Library, crossing the main channel of Fort Loudon and pointing my bow downstream.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been out before sunrise. Giant fish, veritable leviathans, loll along the surface of the water and slip back into its blackness. I wonder what type of fish they are, rising slowly to greet the day. My nifty new head lamp reflects off the Steeler-gold kayak. I’m hoping it will stop me from becoming a speed bump for bass boats. But this morning, there are very few boats out as the sun starts to chase  blackness to silhouette. A Chris-Craft yacht lumbers down the main channel at idle speed, perhaps heading up to Knoxville to join the Vol Navy for tomorrow’s game. Its wake adds a bit of roll to my forward motion.

I pass a pair of bass fishermen, the first boat I’ve seen since the Chris-Craft.

“How many horsepower is that thing?” the angler asks, shaking his head as I paddle past.

“One. Barely,” I tell him. “I promise I’ll watch my wake.”

We laugh. I continue.

Herons watch warily from their perches on the shore, some brave enough to hold their ground, most lurching skyward in a series of croaks, leaving occasional dimples on water grazed by wings struggling to be airborne. An osprey’s white belly flashes overhead. A kingfisher cackles in the pines lining the shore.

When I reach the osprey nest at the mile 604 daymark, I look longingly at the Loudon Lock and Dam, another mile or two downstream. I’ve wanted to get that far for as long as I’ve been paddling Loudon. But this isn’t the morning to do that. It’s time to turn the kayak. Head back across the main channel to the north shore and make my way back to Duck Cove. That will give me a 12..5-mile dose of morning bliss.

Squinting into the risen sun, I paddle with aching arms.  I think about James Dickey’s “Deliverance,” which I’ve been re-reading and re-watching for reasons that I’m not completely in tune with. I’m not thinking about purty mouths or piggies squealing. I’m thinking about the book’s core themes. The impending harnessing of something wild. A raging river that’s about to be tamed behind a dam, just as this lake was when TVA  impounded it in the 1940s. And how this middle-age kayaker makes his way past lakefront fortress estates where fat suburban Labradors pant from bush to bush, futilely trying to mark the world in fits of canine conquest.

Google Earth/GPS of my route:

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Paddle Bob

Evening paddle

The weather has been great for the past week or so, prompting me to put the kayak in the water on Wednesday night and paddle over to Prater Flats. I was out for about 2 1/2 hours. It was a great wildlife night. Lots of blue heron, kingfishers, osprey and lunker fish roiling the shallow waters of the flats. I also paddled past a massive barge as it lumbered upstream toward Knoxville. I’m thinking about paddling Tennessee River Gorge near Chattanooga soon if the weather doesn’t return to sweltering. Let me know if you want to join me …

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Paddle Bob

Paddling Sinking Creek at sunrise

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I woke up early today and drove down to Concord Cove Park since I still had my kayak on the truck from the Fontana paddles earlier this week. Concord Cove is about a 12 mile roundtrip paddle from the house, which pretty much is as far as I can go in one push, so putting in there gave me the ability to start exploring some new stretches of Loudon.

But instead of heading out onto Loudon I paddled past the Concord Yacht Club and into Sinking Creek. I spent a few hours exploring there, cruising past the Concord and Fox Road marinas and up into the farthest reaches of the creek. At one point, I had to wait for a river otter to swim under the Emory Church Road Bridge before I could enter, ducking my head to avoid scraping it as I paddled through. The area up past the bridge is awesome. Very remote feel despite how much it’s in the middle of everything. In addition to the otter, the highlight of the trip was watching an osprey chase off a Canada goose. Not sure what the goose did to earn the Osprey’s wrath, but it was pretty fun to watch.

Total paddle was almost 12 miles roundtrip. More photos. I’m thinking I’ll leave the kayak up in the garage for a while to encourage me to explore more sections of Loudon and its associated tributaries …

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