Location: Eagle Creek – Turkey Foot Park to Lafayette Road
Distance +/-9 miles
Date: 4-27-07
Gauge: 2.3 (Zionsville)
Paddle Time: +/-3 hours
Weather: Overcast & 70

April Trip – wanting to get in an evening trip that finished up in the dark we packed our headlights and didn’t start until about 6:45 PM. The first two legs of the trip were uneventful since there was plenty of daylight and we had all run them several times before. Tucker dragged his boat through the strainer that tipped us last November but made it through the log/sandbar/strainer combo where he swam in March without any problems. He was pretty happy about that.
We all agreed that this water level was about as low as we would want to go. There were a lot of rocks visible that had not been on the last trip, or that were just underwater before.
Below the Ford Road bridge the creek doesn’t change much. On the map it’s about a 4-mile leg from there to the takeout. About halfway down we decided it was a good time to get the headlights out as it was starting to get dim. There weren’t a lot of drops or riffles to deal with, really similar to upstream.
Just before it got dark James took a swim when the current didn’t take him away from a tree as expected and he ran up on it. Fortunately his headlight was not lost and his GPS is waterproof.
After it got full dark we ran a couple of riffles without hitting anything major, then came upon a large tree blocking the way. Fortunately there was a sandbar river left to use to portage around, but just below that the current made a hard break to river left upstream of another tree, and that it would be difficult to avoid a strainer just downstream of that. We scouted for a way around, but there was no way back onto the creek for further downstream than we wanted to portage.
After deciding we could launch from the downstream end of the sandbar and paddle hard right to fight the current James took off as the guinea pig. Just after passing the end of the tree he was grabbed by an eddy and swung to the right away from the sweeper…piece of cake. Tucker and I went through after that with the same results and we continued on downstream.
The stream below that is basically flat water as it is coming into the reservoir. There were no additional obstacles and we reached the takeout at river right about 9:45. It is an easy drag over an embankment and about 100 yards through grass to the parking area along Lafayette Road just north of the bridge, much easier than trying to negotiate the steep banks right at the bridge.