Avid Canoeist Chronicles : 2004-10-11 Fall Colors Peak on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis

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2004-10-11 Fall Colors Peak on the Mississippi River in Minneapolis

Eleven people showed up at practice tonight so I ended up in my C1 racer. I had just repaired the footbrace so I wanted to check it out anyway. I paired the two new people up with experienced racers and asked the rest to paddle with the ones they hadn’t paddled with for a while. I put Karen, a woman who has been coming regularly this year, with Bill Kremer. Karen wanted to try the stern so Bill took the bow of my Minnesota II. The canoe was too heavy in the front and Bill slid further forward to make it even worse. They were zig-zagging all over the Mississippi River right from the start.

The rest of the teams were zooming along in the racing canoes and got way ahead of Bill and Karen before we gathered up to head downstream. I fell back with them to see what I could do to help them out. I asked Bill to slide back in his bow seat and see if that helped. It did a bit, but not completely. Karen was still having trouble with the steering. Especially on the right side when she needed the canoe to turn left. I pointed out that she was putting the blade in the water at a bad angle and she tried to change it like I demonstrated, but had a very hard time doing it more than one stroke before falling back to the wrong angle again. Bill was very patient and kept trying to steer from the front as much as he could.

Still, the canoe zagged way to far to the right every time. I asked them if they wanted to switch bow and stern, but Karen wanted to learn the stern and Bill said he was fine. The rest of the canoes got way ahead and waited up at the Franklin Avenue Bridge for us to catch up. We told them to go on ahead because we were going to turn back early since it was already almost dusk. We had passed the most beautiful part of the fall colors in the trees on shore on the way down. The rest of the trees were a bit past the peak colors. Two flocks of geese came in for a landing to spend the night on the river.

Since Karen was still having problems keeping the canoe going straight, I dropped onto their stern wake and called “Huts” for her. She was still having problems putting the blade in the water perpendicular to the center line of the canoe. In the course of the conversations, we found out that she had a lot of injuries when she was a downhill skier and it may be that her left wrist is stiffer than her right wrist and keeping her from changing the angle of the paddle blade. She eventually started making smaller zags and I pulled ahead to talk to Todd and John who had come back early too.

It was completely dark as we passed under the Highway 394 bridge and a barge was coming towards us heading downstream. The huge searchlights lit up the trees on the far side of the river and we saw the other 3 canoes heading upstream along the shore. We stayed close to the riverbank as the barge’s huge diesel engine thrummed past us and the weakening rollers jostled our canoes several times.

Lights from the city of Minneapolis and the University of Minnesota reflected on the dark water beneath us as we approached the concrete wall. I ran along the wall as the other canoes stayed out in the faster current and pulled ahead of most of them. Peter Hanson and Ed Arenz came up alongside me and stayed on my side wake. As we crossed the river, we could barely see what we knew was a large red metal buoy near our landing site. Peter and Ed sprinted and I had everything I could do to stay on their side wake until they finally stopped sprinting and were both surprised to see me come back up beside them because they thought they had dropped me. I tried not so show them I was out of breath as I pretended it wasn’t hard to do.

We finished followed another fine night on the river with a dinner at the Lotus Restaurant on Oak Street just south of Washington Avenue. This may well be the last warm night even though we will be there two more times before the daylight savings time shuts off the lights early and we all move to our other winter pastimes. In my case, I will be doing basketball at the over 40 pick up night at the Northwest club on Highway 100 in Brooklyn Park. Many of the others will be cross country skiing until next spring.