Mile 890.5 - RBD Sleeping Giant Eddy

John Ruskey

20 Apr 2026 � 2 min read

890.5 RBD Sleeping Giant Eddy

Sean Rowe and I got pulled into this eddy in Dec 1983 and could not get out. We were approaching New Madrid around noon on that cold day, after several days of rain, and looking forward to a dry day in town, partly to resume our never-ending search for the best hamburger in America. Every town we stopped in between the North Woods and the Gulf of Mexico we intended to find the best burger. We weren’t paying attention to eddies. Once we got pulled in we didn’t think much of it - at first. We’d been sucked into similar situations before. You get sucked in. You work your way out. You continue on downstream. Except this time it was different: we couldn’t get out. Our 12 x 24 foot raft seemed tiny compared to the massive piles of loose driftwood that were stuck in and was churning end over end, rolling over with sickening crunching sounds and gulping squishing sounds. We were caught amongst huge logs, and barrels, refrigerators, paint cans, 5-gallon buckets, sides of a building, a section of dock decking, some telephone poles, and everything else spinning around in this maelstrom. We pushed and pulled. We thrashed with our long sweep oars. We broke two oars. We switched out our spare set. We broke those. Our spirits, which had soared high all day with the prospect of town now plummeted to the bottom of the river. Around and around and around we revolved. It was dizzying. It was un-nerving. It was comic. We rotated around for several hours with our broken oars tossed aside on deck. We gave up at times, and lay panting on the floor of the raft wondering what would become of us. And then sometime towards sunset something changed. We suddenly found ourselves pushed to the edge of the mess where giant boils were billowing upwards, and then one of those open water boils completely surrounded us and pushed all the driftwood away. And then it seemed to breathe in deep and long, and then exhale in a long upwelling of water, and then it spit us out. It was like being ejected from the belly of the whale. We spun around as the downstream current grabbed us and then propelled us on down the bank towards the New Madrid riverfront. We were free! We still had to get to shore with mangled oars, but at least we could once again maneuver our cumbersome raft. Those burgers we found that night in New Madrid were indeed the best burgers in America!

This sleeping giant of an eddy is quiet until the water rises above 30CG. The Morrison Towhead islands are connected to land until the river rises well into medium stage, around 25CG, when the dikes start overflowing. When the river rises above 30CG paddlers can skirt around the eddy, and jump into the opening below, and enjoy a back channel entrance into New Madrid with a close up glimpse of the mouth of the infamous St. John’s Bayou.

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