The Wateree River: Day 1
For our third annual river trip, my good friend Jerry Craven and I decided to expand our horizons beyond the borders of the Lone Star State. I lived in South Carolina back in the 1990s when I was getting my MFA, and I canoed many of the Palmetto State’s rivers then. One that I missed was the Wateree. So when Jerry and I made up our minds to do a South Carolina river, in honor of my move back to the Palmetto State, the Wateree seemed like a natural choice. For Jerry’s and my May 2009 trip, we canoed the fifty-mile stretch from the Lake Wateree Dam to the Highway 76/378 Bridge about halfway between Columbia and Sumter. We took four days to complete the trip, but could easily have done it in three. But the idea was to savor the river and the good company in my trusty Pelican Colorado canoe, rather than just to get from Point A to Point B.
Monday, May 18th
After a bit of trouble finding the put-in place just north of Camden, we finally go onto the river at the Lugoff Public Landing just below Lake Wateree Dam. Although it’s difficult to find, the put-in site at the Lugoff Public Landing is excellent. There is a cement boat ramp for easy river access, and plenty of convenient parking. We loaded up the canoe with our waterproof-bagged supplies and got onto the river at 5 p.m. After a couple of days of heavy rain on the watershed, the river was running very high and fast, and they started releasing water from the dam again just as put in. No sooner had we started to paddle in the already-swift-moving stream, than we heard the warning sirens start blaring. The current started to pick up even more, and we had to deal with two to three-foot waves that washed riverwater into the boat.
About a half-hour downriver, we hit a Class II rapid that normally wouldn’t have been a problem. But the current was so strong, we were swept onto a rock and got stuck there. Immediately, the canoe started to roll over. So I hopped out of the boat, found footing, braced myself against the strength of the water sweeping by, and steadied the boat. But I couldn’t shove the canoe off the rock. The problems wasn’t that I was incapable—rather, just as we were hitting the rapid, two very inconsiderate gentlemen in a johnboat anchored at the bottom of the only passage through, and started fishing. To top it off, one of them got a strike. So Jerry and I very considerately waited for the very inconsiderate fisherman to reel in his very small striper before I shoved us off and hopped back into the boat. We narrowly missed colliding with the johnboat as we paddled through the rest of the rapid and made our exit.
After that, we had more problems with the big waves, but there were no more real rapids. It was fastmoving flatwater for the rest of the day. We passed underneath the Hwy 601 Bridge and started looking for a campsite. But although there were big beautiful trees on both banks—sycamores, cottonwoods, sweet gums, water oaks, elms, and pines—there were no places to set up camp. Finally, we hit the I-20 Bridge and pulled out. There was a campable site on the left bank, almost directly beneath the eastbound lane, and we headed for it. The traffic noise was awful, and the bridge infrastructure was less than scenic. But darkness was falling fast, and we had to take what we could get.
Jerry helped set up camp, then tried to catch a fish for dinner. I finished setting up camp, then gathered more firewood and got a fire roaring not far from the tent. Jerry not having caught any keepers, I made sandwiches and cracked open a couple of delicious beers, and we sat by the fire and relaxed as much as possible under the circumstances. But it wasn’t long before we noticed that the river was rising again. It was hard to tell how fast. So we set up a line of sticks between the river’s edge and the tent, and waited with our beers beside the fire to see what would happen. Gradually, the river swallowed the line of sticks one by one until it was too close to the tent to wait and watch any longer. So we pulled up the stakes and dragged the tent through the grass uphill to another relatively flat spot. Then we reset the stakes and moved the rest of our gear uphill next to the tent. After that, it was time to collapse into our sleeping bags and hope a wall of water wouldn’t wake us in the night.
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