Launch

Terry Butler is my paddling partner. He will be one of my witnesses for the start of my attempt to be the oldest person to paddle source to sea on the Mississippi River. I have two other witnesses: Mary Ann Williams of North Carolina and Tracey Young of Louisiana.

we started paddling the Mississippi River at 12:49 pm on August 22, 2021. We stopped at 4:30, after covering about 2 1/2 miles. We did not do much paddling. We walked and pulled our boats some. We slid our boats over two beaver dams. We spent a lot of time trying to find the channel in the tall grass. We had to navigate floating islands of tall trees grass. We had to make mats by bending the tall reeds down and crawling on our knees on the mats because otherwise our feet would break through the crust and get stuck in a bottomless black stinky muck. In this way we managed to get our boats out of the marsh. We then put on the portage wheels and pulled our boats to the place where we are now spending the night, under a bridge.