The Kanawha does not leave much room to be wrong in. The navigable water is a channel between banks that do not move, the boat coming the other way may be a tow that wants all of it, and the run is cut into segments by structures you get past one chamber at a time. On open water a mistake costs you a detour. Here it costs you a wait, or a place you cannot turn around in, or a crossing you can see perfectly well and still cannot get under.
Helm's Kanawha pack carries 215 bridges, sixth among the fifteen US rivers Helm builds packs for, and 65 overhead cables. With them come 282 charted lights, 24 charted lock features, 19 charted wrecks, 9 charted obstructions and 7 restricted areas. For the water itself there are 31 charted depth areas and 123 depth contours. The whole pack downloads at 1 MB, which on a phone is nothing, and it works from then on without a signal.
Put the 215 bridges together with the 65 overhead cables and the pack holds 280 charted crossings over this river. The bridges are sixth of the fifteen rivers, the cables eighth. That is the pair of numbers that decides whether the trip you have in mind is the trip you get to make, and it decides it before you untie.
The two halves behave differently. A bridge has a charted vertical clearance, sometimes a lift, and somebody at the far end of a radio. A cable has none of that. It was strung at a height that made sense to the people who strung it, it has no tender and no schedule, and it does not care what the river is doing under it that week. Sixty five of them is a lot of crossings that cannot be asked a question.
Set your air draft in Helm once and the charted clearance on each of those 280 gets checked against it. If you run a flybridge, or you are moving a boat with the stick up, that check is the difference between planning the passage and finding out about it at the bend. This is the river where the binding number lives above the waterline rather than below it.
| In the chart pack | Count |
|---|---|
| Bridges | 215 |
| Overhead cables | 65 |
| Charted lights | 282 |
| Lock features | 24 |
| Charted depth areas | 31 |
| Depth contours | 123 |
| Charted obstructions | 9 |
| Charted wrecks | 19 |
| Restricted areas | 7 |
Counted from the Helm chart pack for the Kanawha River, built from the official inland electronic navigational charts published for it. The pack downloads at about 1 MB. Lock features are counted as the chart draws them, with chambers, gates and dams as separate objects.
Helm builds chart packs for fifteen US rivers. Line the Kanawha up against the other fourteen and the ordering describes the river better than any single count does.
The pack carries 24 charted lock features, seventh among the thirteen river packs that have any. Read that as a count of structures drawn on the chart rather than a count of places. A chamber, a gate and a dam are each charted in their own right, so more than one of those 24 can belong to the same spot on the river. Winfield is one of the names that turns up in the data.
What a structure does to a trip is change the unit you plan in. Between two of them you have a stretch you can run more or less continuously at whatever speed suits you. At the structure you have an event, with other people already in it, and a tow locking through is not going to be quick about it. Plan the day in pools rather than in hours and the arithmetic comes out closer to what happens.
Helm draws the chambers, the gates and the dams where the chart puts them, so the thing ahead of you has a shape on the screen instead of a name on a list. Coming down on a structure you have not run before, the shape is most of what you want: which side the chamber is on, where the wall begins, and how much river is left on the other side of it.
19 charted wrecks and 9 charted obstructions, sixth of the fifteen rivers and sixth of the twelve packs that carry any. By coastal standards those are small numbers. They do not act like small numbers here, because the water you are permitted to use is narrow and a good share of it belongs at any moment to whoever is coming the other way.
A wreck in open water is a detour you take without thinking about it. A wreck beside a river channel is a negotiation with the traffic. If a tow is working up and the charted hazard sits on the side you were going to give him, you are picking between two things you did not want, and the useful moment to have learned about that wreck was several minutes before the bend. All 28 of them are on the chart.
The pack also holds 7 restricted areas. Seven is not many. On a river it does not have to be, because a restricted area here sits inside the only water there is, so a single one of them can set how a whole stretch gets run.
Next to 215 bridges, 31 charted depth areas and 123 depth contours look like small numbers, and the ordering is the point rather than a footnote to it. A river with dams charted along it is a river whose level is managed in steps, so the surface does less along its length than tidal water does, where the bottom gets a new shape twice a day. The chart spends its detail where the variation actually is.
That variation is at the edge. The middle of a pool is rarely what gets you. What gets you is the inside of a bend, the water just off the end of a structure, and the ground immediately outside the line the traffic keeps to. Helm plans against the draft you enter the same way it does anywhere else, and on this river most of the answer is about staying inside a line rather than finding a way across something.
The 282 charted lights, ninth of the fifteen, are the same information after dark. On open water lights mark hazards and entrances. On a river they mark the shape of the thing you are following, so running at night comes down to knowing which one you are about to lose behind a point and which one picks you up after it. That sequence is on the chart whether or not you can see the bank.
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.
Yes. The Kanawha pack carries 24 charted lock features, seventh among the thirteen river packs that have any, drawn on the chart where the chart puts them. That figure counts features rather than places, because a chamber, a gate and a dam are each charted on their own and several of them can belong to the same spot on the river. Winfield is one of the names that appears in the data. What you get on screen coming down on a structure is its shape and which side the chamber is on, which is the part you cannot work out from a name.
215 bridges and 65 overhead cables, which comes to 280 charted crossings over one river. The bridges are sixth among the fifteen US rivers Helm builds packs for and the cables eighth. Set your air draft in Helm once and the charted vertical clearance on each of those crossings is checked against it. If you carry height, this is the figure that decides the trip on this river, and the 65 cables are the half of it with nobody to call and no schedule to work around.
Two. Helm builds the Kanawha as its own pack and the Ohio River as its own, with the Monongahela as another again, so you carry the water you actually run. The Kanawha pack is 1 MB and holds the 215 bridges, 65 overhead cables, 282 charted lights, 24 charted lock features, 19 charted wrecks and 9 charted obstructions described on this page. Once it is on the phone it works with no signal, which is the normal condition of a long day between structures.
Helm Boating