A break from the hard work of the portage at Barnett Shoals
Dear Friends: You’ll forgive us scribes for the delay in reporting on Day Two. It was a busy one. As you saw in our last post, Day One ended with a fairly easy passage around-slash-through the trip’s first dam, in UGA’s Whitehall Forest.
Well… no sooner had we gotten underway on Day 2 when, just 4.5 miles from the put-in, we came to Dam Number Two: the impressive 40-foot cascade of river over the century-old Barnett Shoals Dam near Watkinsville. Some of the paddlers chose to carry their boats around the dam (a quarter-mile trek), the old fashioned way, while others took advantage of the help provided by some fantastic volunteers from Athens – a swarthy crew of guys who loaded the boats onto pickup trucks and utility trailers and pulled them around the dam in the noonday heat.
From there, we descended into the forested quietude that is the Oconee National Forest. Fifty or so of us stopped for a tour of a late-18th century fort site with local historians, and at day’s end many of us hopped out to see the sights at Scull Shoals, the famous ghost town of the Oconee. A thriving mill town in the mid-19th century, Scull Shoals met its doom as the land-use practices of the very cotton economy that fueled the town’s success eventually brought destructive floods and river sedimentation, ruining its usefulness as a mill site and bringing about its demise. Pretty fascinating stuff for a river trip!
Some days we all get a little tuckered out on the river...
Today, Day Three’s launch found us enjoying the sounds of birdsong as we continued downstream through the National Forest. Halfway through the day, we came to the backwaters of Lake Oconee. Around the midway point at a waterfowl area known as Dyar’s Pasture, the river lost its current – not the best river-scape to travel on a hot day, but nonetheless a change of scenery with fascinating wetlands and backwaters hosting egrets and White Ibis off to the sides of the river channel where upstream there had been just forest.
Beyond Dyar’s Pasture, our paddlers braved the “big water” of Lake Oconee – the top end of the lake, at least. On dead trees left standing in the water when the lake filled behind Wallace Dam in 1980, ospreys had built their nests, and one mama or daddy “fish hawk” was on its massive stick-built nest when many of us paddled by.
These two days of dams and lakes ended – for our paddlers, at least – at Redlands boat ramp on Lake Oconee near Greensboro. There, the canoes and kayaks were loaded onto an armada of trucks and trailers (including an 18-wheeler that made two round trips!) for the portage to the foot of Sinclair Dam near Milledgeville. This highway travel took the boats around two dams, Wallace and Sinclair, and as I write our flotilla waits patiently beside the Oconee for us to meet it again in the morning. From there, we’ve got a free-flowing river between us and Dublin (between here and the sea, actually), with the minor exception of a ruined dam near downtown Milledgeville which we hope presents no big problems.
Wish us luck…
On Paddle Georgia, smiles end even the longest, hottest days!
and cool weather!
-Ben Emanuel
