Arkansas Canoe Club Forums

Sorry for the late notice but if any of you can get away tomorrow, we will be taking some folks down Bayou Deview. We will meet at the Cystal Hill commuter lot on I40 at 9AM and at 11AM where Hwy 17 crosses Deview.

Hope you have a good trip. If anyone takes pictures I would sure like to see them. Sorry I missed this trip. Hope you plan another one soon. Mikki

We knew this going in, but we "found" the lower end of floating levels for this stretch of Bayou DeView. We had to portage logs and wade the boats a number of times. (In summer weather this just makes up part of the "adventure" and isn't really all that bad a thing.)

We were rewarded for our efforts by an unusally good day for wildlife sightings; many friends of DeBo were seen, plus deer, racoon, beaver, owls, and birds of many other varieties. The lower water levels seems to concentrate everything near the central channel; on our "high water" floats everything is scattered over a much broader area of woods so you don't see as much.

For future reference; I'd suggest 14.5 feet as a minimum level for this stretch of river. (we had 13.2 rising to 14 during the day, but we got ahead of the rise so we didn't really benefit from that.) Also, remember the gage is far upstream, so what you really want to know is what the gage said 5 days (yes, 5 days) ago.

An interesting point - in some ways it was easier to find the channel at the low water level than on some of our medium and high water floats. When it gets really low, there is only one choice, and by "default" that becomes the correct choice. At medium water levels, you may have multiple channels, with several ending in a "dead end".