Mile 241.0 - Miles 241-239: LBD Thomas Point (Mallet Bend)

241 - 239 LBD Thomas Point (Mallet Bend)

Warning: Hairpin Bend! Blind Corner! As you enter Mallet Bend around Thomas Point pay special attention to any signs of upstream traffic. Ride the inside of the curve LBD as tightly as possible so that you can run to the shore quickly if needed. You could also ride the far outside of the bend, but that would add another mile at least to your progress.

Upstream tows appear fast here -- and they will be furious if they find a canoe or kayak blocking their passage, and probably run over a paddler caught in the wrong situation. Usually the tow pilots have little margin for error in tight places like this, so give them wide berth. Downstream tows also present paddlers an equally precarious predicament around Thomas Point, they have to make a complete turnabout within a 2 mile stretch of river. They will be equally enraged if you get in their way. The big tows, 42 barges or more, have to go into the flanking maneuver at Thomas Point. If you see a tow coming to a standstill, backing up, stopping, backing some more, and then sitting in the water for long minutes, even a half hour or more, that is a tow making a flanking maneuver. If you happen to get there simultaneous with them, you could easily pass them at the bend. However, if they are completing the maneuver, you had better watch out. Once they have swung the nose of the tow around and picked out the direction downstream, their big 3200 hp engines x 3 eight-foot brass propellers = 9600hp total propulsion will suddenly fire up and start edging downstream like a herd of buffalos. You can tell when this point is reached when a cloud storm of thick black diesel smoke suddenly billows out of its smokestacks.

Thomas Point is a hairpin curve that makes good instruction for the bends to come downstream which will be swarming in towboats and work boats, but also be populated with fast-moving freighters. For some geologic or hydrologic reason not understood, the bends of the SoLa river from here on downstream do not make smooth rounded curves like they do above here. The bends come to sharp points, blind corners. The river enters full throttle going one direction, say to the west, makes some chaotic swirly changes, and then exits in entirely the opposite direction, in this case going east-northeast.