Immediately the wind started pushing us, and not the direction we wanted to go. I'd try to head directly into the wind, but kept getting turned and pushed off course. The trestle is, what I know now, a little over two miles away from where we put in. It didn't seem possible we'd make it. And at one point we gave up and decided to head back.
But, what else did we have to do that afternoon? Nothing! We decided to give it one more big push.
If you're not familiar with the Harry S. Truman Reservoir, there are parts upstream where trees still stand in the middle of the water. They are long since dead, but you can still navigate through them almost as if the land had never been flooded.
These trees proved to be the key. When we decided to make our last big push, instead of focusing on the bridge over two miles away, I picked out a tree just a few yards ahead and made for it. Before I knew it, we'd reached the tree, so I picked a stump yet a few yards ahead again. We reached it.
We leap-frogged from tree to stump to tree in this way and found that, though the paddling was strenuous, we were making progress. We would do so well at times that I would fail to pick out an intermediate target and just paddle toward the bridge. That's exactly when the wind would get a hold of us and turn us around. So I'd have to spend a few minutes getting the canoe pointed in the right direction, which wasn't easy. Then once again I'd pick out a tree and make for it.
It took us about two hours to get to the bridge and about a half hour to get back. Yeah, it was ridiculous.
There's got to be a lesson there about how in order to reach your big goals you have to set smaller, intermediate goals.
Here's the trestle. I'd like to jump from it some day, but it is very high. About a hundred feet I would guess. I suppose I need a smaller, more attainable goal. I'll paddle out to it on a less windy day next time.
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