The very next day I am chugging along thinking how lovely my splint is working as my oar. It was a cool overcast day which was a great change from the norm. I was in a very good mood and only 60 miles from Memphis. I think the gods felt that things were getting a little too easy for me so they sent me the tug boat from hell. This thing was pushing 35 fully loaded barges up stream. Half-loaded barges will normally throw a four to five foot wake traveling up stream. With a fully loaded tug, they can throw a five to six foot wake. I was running without a radio as my batteries were dead; I didn't see him coming around the corner and chose the wrong line for my boat. You generally stay to one side of the channel or the other. The red or green buoys. Both have the advantages and disadvantages in different circumstances. What I am trying to say is that on sharp turns with a tug coming up stream, you do not want to take the outside line but after you get to a certain point there is no changing your mind. You are committed because crossing over would just be suicide. So as I was coming into the turn, the barge was exiting the turn but since they are pushing so much weight and they have to slow down for the turn they end up just sitting there for three to four minutes without even barely moving. This tug just pushed that five foot wake back at me as it was trying to get around this corner. Also, unlucky for me, there were barges all lined up on the shore so there was nowhere for the wake to be absorbed. It just kept bouncing back and feeding into the system, creating a quarter mile of 6-8 ft chop coming in all directions. This was by far the worst situation I have been in especially with an oar that was hanging together with duck tape. At this point I am paddling as hard as the oar can take and also trying to line up with the biggest waves so i can take them head on. It helped a bit, but I ended up taking on a lot of water. Once I made it a little more than halfway through this gauntlet, I heard a horrible sound...Snap! It was a metal scraping sound. My back left support for the pontoon had broken off. Now truthfully, I thought I was going to die. I thought if the firm support to this pontoon breaks off, I am going for a swim. I am a very good swimmer but never tested my strength against 7 foot waves, current, eddies and undertow. All of which came together to make that "disturbance." Thank god the other support did not break off and the pontoon stayed mostly in place through the rest of it. The really weird thing was when I got out of it; there weren't any waves. A dike was holding it all in one little section of river. My little corner of hell I guess. Again, time to duct tape the other post that I had left from cannibalizing the canopy the other day. This came in handy for this mend job. At this point, I knew nothing could keep me from Memphis. So onward, I rowed.
