Finishing the Thursday Paddle season in great style, four of us decided to take one for the team and determine if we could find the absolute minimum for paddling Anglers to Lock 10. Success—we found it! I don't know about "absolute," and if you want to try it any lower I wish you Godspeed, but 2.74 feet on the Little Falls gage was as low a level as any of us want to experience.
That said, it was great to be out on a cool November day (cloudy, almost 50 degrees, light breeze), and we had a fine paddle. Paddlers were Dave (Cotton) Cottingham, Alexis Frederick-Frost, and Chris Oberlin in kayaks, and me in my canoe. We encountered no spots so low that we couldn't find a route—there was some scraping, to be sure, but not too bad—until we got to within 50 yards of the Lock 10 takeout. At that point, we had to drag only a few feet and then carry across sand, so no big problem. It was better, in fact, than on wet days when we paddle in all the way but have to slip-slide up the takeout's muddy bank.
After a quick paddle to the Maryland chute and back (the chute still had a grabby hole, which we declined to play in), we headed down the main (Teacups) channel rather than the Offutt channel. Yellow Falls and Stubblefield were still there, very noticeably low but still Class II and somewhat playful. We noticed in particular that Stubblefield formed a significant, choppy drop, but the long, bouncy wave train below was gone baby gone.
Welcome and congrats to Alexis, who admirably racked up a personal first descent on his first run with the Thursday Paddlers. And thanks are due to him for bearing with us, what with all our comments describing what the run would look like if only ….
I had been prepared for a slog at the takeout, so actually I was pleasantly surprised. What I hadn't thought about was how little current there would be getting down the river. Apart from Yellow Falls and Stubblefield, it was almost a flatwater paddle, with some interesting winding around boulders only the tops of which we'd ever seen before.
—Larry Lempert