Day 15 -- SOS paddling and rapids-portaging down the Suwannee River

river paddler.   photo from Day 12

By about 9:00pm Friday SOS was sleeping on a screened-in porch in a public building by the river overnight.  He slept through his 2:00am alarm clock (a good thing) and was on paddling downstream on the Suwannee River by 6:30am today, Saturday March 19.   He will paddle 220 miles down the Suwannee to the Gulf of Mexico.   Travel on this river will be downstream!

Suwannee River put-in at Fargo, GA

arriving by bike

leaving by boat

SOS track as of 9:25am on Saturday.    Red star marks the position of LRock and Crazy Russian.

portage around Big Shoals rapids  near White Springs, FL

Aerial view by John Moran

SOS reached the Big Shoals area at about 6:00pm Saturday.

At 7:00pm he texted about the portage around the rapids...

"OMG it was so hard.  Fortunately there was a group of kids camping there and one of them helped me get the boat over the cliff at the beginning then I had to belay the boat down at the end.   The hardest part was probably getting back in the boat on the other side I got my pants all wet.   I'm going to have to pull off and switch into night clothes and do some better boat packing because I had to assemble the cart."

By the end of the day, SOS had paddled 60+ miles

Campsite Saturday night