Trip: Ohoopee River from Ga. 152 to Ga. 292
Meeting place, time and date: Ohoopee at Ga. 152, Friday March 11, 2011 at 12:00 p.m. It took us about an hour from the time to unload boats and gear, set shuttle then get on the water.
Put in: River left above the bridge at Ga. 152, 01:15 pm.
Take out: River right above or below the bridge at Ga. 292, 04:45 pm
Trip distance: 8.6 miles according to Southern Georgia Canoeing guide
Shuttle distance: 10 miles
Trip notes and comments (paddlers, good stuff, bad stuff, river level, lunch stop, etc): Paddlers were Lamar Phillips, Buddy Goolsby paddling sea kayaks and Dickie Tillman paddling a solo canoe. Lamar and Buddy drove down from Atlanta and met me at the Ohoopee and Ga. 152 bridge. Middle Ga. had received about 1-1.5 inches of rain on Wednesday 2 days before which brought the Ohoopee up to it’s current level of 11.8/480 cfs on the Swainsboro gage. On Wednesday before the rain it was reading about 11.3/380 cfs on the Swainsboro gage. At this water level the Ohoopee was in it’s banks but there were still sandbars out; however, they were not near as large as they would have been at lower water levels. The day was a little windy due to a cold front moving through after the recent rain but the day was sunny and pleasant with the highs reaching the mid 60s.
This is a beautiful easy section of the Ohoopee with lots of sandbars. We did not encounter any strainers or deadfalls blocking the river on this section. There is a fair amount of houses and river shacks on this section and usually their river front land is posted. There were some nice sandbars that were not posted. We stopped on a small one for a snack and break at a small one on river left about 02:25 pm. We passed a very large sandbar at about 3:35 pm that was not posted as we could tell.
We arrived at the Ga. 292 bridge at about 4:45 pm making our total paddle time about 3.5 hours. Due to the late start we did not stop very much although we did not paddle hard. Paddle time could be easily extended with more stops and exploring some of the many interesting looking slues or partial dead lakes on this section.
Here is a link to some pictures.
