The Arkansas is a managed river, and running it is mostly a matter of knowing what the management does to your day. The water ahead of you is a pool held at a level rather than a tide that comes back on its own. The deep part of it is a navigation channel that a loaded tow needs all of, and the passage through is cut into segments by lock chambers. Distance is a poor measure of a day out here. The bend you already know is rarely the thing that catches you out. The crossing you have not been under before, at a stage you have not seen it at, usually is.
Helm builds the Arkansas as its own chart pack, and the counts on this page are taken out of that pack layer by layer. It carries 168 bridges and 67 overhead cables, 555 charted lights, 375 charted depth areas and 397 depth contours. There are 52 charted lock features in it, along with 29 restricted areas and 17 charted wrecks. The whole thing downloads at 6 MB and keeps working after the signal goes.
Helm builds a separate pack for fifteen US rivers, and the way the Arkansas places across the layers says more about the river than about the app. It sits in the middle of the fifteen for bridges, eighth. It sits third for charted lock features, out of the thirteen river packs that carry any at all. A river that is ordinary on crossings and near the top on built structure in the water is a river whose difficulty was arranged by engineers rather than by geology.
Fifth on lights and fifth on charted depth areas is the other half of that picture. The light count is worth reading against the bridge count. 555 charted lights against 168 bridges is better than three lit marks for every crossing, which is what a working navigation channel looks like when it is expected to be run through the night. None of these places make the river harder or easier than the next one. They tell you where your attention goes on this water, and on the Arkansas it goes to the chambers and to the height of things.
| In the chart pack | Count |
|---|---|
| Bridges | 168 |
| Overhead cables | 67 |
| Charted lights | 555 |
| Lock features | 52 |
| Charted depth areas | 375 |
| Depth contours | 397 |
| Charted wrecks | 17 |
| Restricted areas | 29 |
Counted from the Helm chart pack for the Arkansas River, built from the official inland electronic navigational charts published for it. The pack downloads at about 6 MB. Lock features are counted as the chart draws them, with chambers, gates and dams as separate objects.
Add the 168 bridges to the 67 overhead cables and the pack holds 235 charted crossings above this river. The cables place sixth of the fifteen, a step higher than the bridges do, which is the usual shape inland. A power line is a cheap way over a river and gets strung where the banks pinch in, which is not always a place anybody ever wanted a road.
A bridge has an owner and sometimes somebody to call. A cable has neither. It hangs at the height it was strung at, and the only warning you get is the one you gave yourself before you left the dock. If you take a mast up this river, or a flybridge with an aerial on top of it, those 67 are what the trip gets planned around, and the 168 bridges are what you check the stage against on the morning you go.
Helm keeps an air draft figure for your boat. Set it once and the charted vertical clearance on each of those crossings is checked against it. The charted figure is a surveyed one measured to a datum, and the pool it hangs over is held by a dam, so treat it as the number you start the call with rather than the last word on a high water week.
The pack carries 52 charted lock features, third among the thirteen Helm river packs that carry any. That figure needs a word of explanation, because it is not a count of locks. The inland charts draw a lock installation as several separate objects, with chambers, gates and dams each charted in their own right, so 52 counts charted hardware rather than sites. Read it for what it honestly measures, which is how much built structure sits in this river.
The names arrive the way the charts write them. Dardanelle, Toad Suck Ferry, Webbers Falls and Robert S. Kerr are among the ones you will find drawn in the pack.
What the count means for a day on the water is plain enough. Your progress is set by what is happening in the chamber ahead of you and not by the throttle. A tow locking through costs you more time than any current on this river ever will, so the sensible plan is the one that ends somewhere you can tie up whether or not you get through the next chamber before dark. The lock features are drawn on the chart in Helm where they actually sit, so the structure is in front of you along with everything else.
555 charted lights puts the Arkansas fifth of the fifteen. On a coast a light count is mostly about approaches and harbor entrances. Here it is the channel itself being marked, because the commercial traffic does not tie up at sunset and the marks have to hold up for the people who are still moving at two in the morning.
That has a use in daylight too. A river lit this thoroughly is one where the channel is defined mark to mark along its whole length, so the question at any bend is which side of the next one you belong on rather than where the channel has wandered off to. Underneath it the pack carries 375 charted depth areas and 397 depth contours, fifth and seventh of the fifteen. On a pool river those areas are what describe the shape of the water outside the sailing line. That is the ground that catches people who pull out of the channel for a tow and then take their time getting back into it.
The pack holds 29 restricted areas, sixth of the fourteen river packs that have any, and 17 charted wrecks, seventh of the fifteen. Neither is a hard number to hold in your head. Having them drawn is still worth something at the moment you are looking at the water instead of the chart.
The restricted areas do more than sit there. When Helm plans a route it treats them as something to steer around, and the explanation for the leg says how much of the straight line would have gone through one, so a detour is a decision you can look at and argue with rather than a bend you either trust or ignore.
Seventeen wrecks reads differently on a river than it would on open water. You are held to a corridor here, because the tow coming the other way decides how much of the river you get to use, and the room you have to give a charted obstruction a wide berth is room somebody else may already be occupying.
These counts describe what the chart pack carries, not the state of the river today. Charted data ages, pools change with the dams, and a lock can be out of service. Keep a lookout, listen to the traffic, and verify locally.
The Arkansas pack carries 52 charted lock features, third among the thirteen Helm river packs that carry any. The inland charts draw a lock installation as more than one object, with chambers, gates and dams charted separately, so that figure describes charted features rather than a count of sites. The names come through as the charts write them, and Dardanelle, Toad Suck Ferry, Webbers Falls and Robert S. Kerr are among the ones drawn in the pack.
168 bridges and 67 overhead cables, which is 235 charted crossings in one pack. That places the Arkansas eighth of the fifteen rivers Helm packs on bridges and sixth on cables. Set your air draft once and the charted vertical clearance on each crossing is checked against it, which on this river decides more passages than anything under the keel does.
Yes. The Arkansas is built as its own 6 MB pack, and the Lower Mississippi River and the Ouachita River are packed separately from it. If the trip crosses from one to the other, pull both down before you leave, since a pack works with no signal once it is on the device but cannot be fetched out on the water.
Helm Boating