CANOE CAMPING AUGUST 23-24, 1997
The weekend was another canoe camping weekend. We started at a guy's house on the Amite river below Denham Springs at the end of the Hoo Shoo Too Road. The river there is wide and no current whatsoever.
We paddled upstream. I was in the tandem canoe with Mimi Clifton. Bill and Ann Hager were in a tandem and so were Dennis Begnaud and Richard Oswald. Ruby Akerson and Richie Labat were in Mohawk solo thirteens. We started at 9Am and stopped at a little beach for lunch at noon. After lunch we kept on upstream for about another hour.
Mimi, Ruby and I were camping and the rest were making it a day trip. They said goodbye at this point and turned around to go back. We kept going looking for a good camping beach. After about half an hour we decided to go back to a big nice looking beach we had seen about 15 minutes before the lunch break. When we got there some kids were camping on it so we went back to the lunch beach and camped there.
The amazing thing was that we did not see another person or another boat all day until we saw the kids on the beach we wanted. We set up camp, ate good food, sat around and talked, watched the stars, listened to the night sounds and went to bed about 9.
Sunday morning was lazy. We didn't crawl out of our tents until the sun was well up. We had a good breakfast of cafe-o-lait, cheese grits with diced ham with bananas for desert.
After breakfast we very leisurely broke camp, packed the canoes and started back. When we got to the beach where the kids were camping they had left. We stopped to check their camp site. It was back in the trees with a nice clear sandy spot. They had a left a lot of trash so we picked it all up in case we wanted to go back there.
We stopped at a little beach for lunch and 4 jet skis went by. Then we started seeing people in motor boats at all the beaches. It seems like Sunday afternoon is when they get out and use this river.
The only negative about the trip was the water in the river didn't look very good so we wouldn't swim although we saw other people swimming Sunday.
Hulin Robert