After leaving Craven's Hammock Sunday morning, and after paddling three or four hours back through the forests and prairies, we arrived at the sill. The sill is a massive earthen dam which runs for several thousand feet on the Southwest edge of the Okefenokee. Its purpose is to help keep more water in the swamp thereby reducing the incidence of fires. There's been some debate recently about the relative benefit of the sill, and some consideration given to removing it. This view, looking south, has the sill on the right. We paddled along the sill to reach the northernmost of the two spillways where the Suwannee River slips out of the Okefenokee, headed for the Gulf of Mexico.
Since we were only able to get an overnight trip into the Okefenokee, instead of one of the multi-night trips, we wanted to stretch out our trip by paddling a few days down the Suwannee. To cross the sill and enter the Suwannee from the Okefenokee requires a special permit. Otherwise we'd have been required to return to Stephen C. Foster State Park that Sunday. We'd gotten that permit prior to beginning the trip. We arrived here right about lunch time. We had to carry the boats across the sill.
Catching some rays on the sill.
Sunday night we arrived back at Griffis Fish Camp. The next morning, Kes had to leave to get back to work. Before he left he took this picture of me, J.D. and Jeff, ready to shove off down the Suwannee. The Suwannee gets out of its banks every spring, and this year was no exception. Here, the tea color of the water is highlighted against the white sand beneath.
Calm and Quiet. Compelling.
There is an elegance and majesty to this venerable giant standing sentinal on the Suwannee River. The River was up 6 to 8 feet. I wonder what the diameter of its bulbous trunk is at normal water line.
An ideal camp site. I had expected one of these -- underneath a Live Oak on a white sand bar.
We expected Tuesday to encounter these shoals -- Big Shoals, the largets rapids on the Suwannee. The water was way up and the rapids were rocking. Although they look harmless enough, we didn't intend to run them because of the jagged limestone and what that rock could do to our plastic canoes. The guidebook said that once people have successfully run the first rapid and are breathing a sigh of relief, they all of a sudden find themselves facing more rapids below the first. So, in an abundance of caution, we portaged a looong way around the rapids. The footing was firm and unobstructed, the path easy to follow. The problem was the load. My boat weighs 80 pounds. My biggest drybag probbly weighed 50. I carried both at one time for what I swear was a mile. We sure weren't gonna be surprised by any rapids below the first we'd seen! As I mentioned earlier, you can haul freight when canoe tripping. And that's what J.D. and I were doing. We each had to make a couple trips to tote all the stuff I'd brought. But I sure did sleep well on my inflatable queen size air mattress that night.
The action of the tannin-laden water pouring tumultuosly over the rocks creates a foam blanket that covers the River from bank to bank for several hundred feet below the shoals. A couple of notable events occurred in the sky on this trip. The first is I saw a swallow-tail kite. Very cool. I had brought my bird book expecting to see a lot more avian activity in the swamp than we did. The other is we got buzzed by a fighter jet. J.D. and I had gone to a couple of air shows and had studied on fighter jets, and this looked to be an F-14. It flew right over our heads! What a rush!! Another interesting thing was we saw a wild sow with about a half a dozen piglets running through the palmettos on the shore.
The further south we got, the more the river slipped back into its banks, and the more we saw exposed the limestone formations that provide so much of the beauty of the Suwanee. Yup, paddled right under this overhang. There's an interesting footnote to the swallow-tail kite story. A few years after this trip, in the midst of the fight against Dupont to keep it from mining the edge of the Okefenokee and potentially destroying the swamp for all time, a representative of the Sierra Club came to an Athens meeting of the Audubon Society to explain the situation. At the conclusion of the fellow's presentation, a lady from the audience asked him if he'd ever seen a swallow-tail kite. I jumped right on that one. Despite my also being a visitor to that meeting, I enthusiastically blurted out, "I have! I have!" I then related the above.
Although we hadn't realized it at the time, our lengthy portage of the earlier evening, had considerably shortened the distance to the take out. We arrived about 11:30 the next morning, Wednesday, the 6th. Unloaded the "freight" we'd been hauling onto the dock --aiyupp, that is the ice chest beside J.D. -- and took the boat out of the water onto the dock. Then had to haul the whole shebang up a few flights of stairs and through the pavilion. But by then, we were "les voyageurs." No load, no portage was too hard for us. Mais non non non.
Headed home.
Post script: It turns out we shouldn't've left those canoes like that on top of Jeff's truck for so long. Now, we're overrun by little green canoes all over the place!.
After leaving Craven's Hammock Sunday morning, and after paddling three or four hours back through the forests and prairies, we arrived at the sill. The sill is a massive earthen dam which runs for several thousand feet on the Southwest edge of the Okefenokee. Its purpose is to help keep more water in the swamp thereby reducing the incidence of fires. There's been some debate recently about the relative benefit of the sill, and some consideration given to removing it. This view, looking south, has the sill on the right. We paddled along the sill to reach the northernmost of the two spillways where the Suwannee River slips out of the Okefenokee, headed for the Gulf of Mexico.
