The Ouachita is a river you run in pieces. Between one lock and dam and the next, the water is held where the dam puts it, the channel does the bending, and what changes from one trip to the next is the stage and who else is on the river with you. A loaded tow coming up through a bend is using the whole channel and cannot give much of it back. Most of what decides a day here gets decided before you cast off: how high your boat is, and how much of the day you are willing to spend waiting for a chamber.
Helm builds a chart pack for the Ouachita covering the run from 31.31 N up to 33.63 N, a bit over two degrees of latitude. It carries 50 bridges, 42 charted overhead cables and 171 charted lights, along with 12 charted lock features, 52 charted depth areas and 55 depth contours. There are 8 restricted areas in it, 4 charted obstructions and one charted wreck. The download is about 2 MB, small enough that it is on the phone long before the question of signal comes up.
The Ouachita is one of fifteen US rivers Helm packs, and the figure that describes it fastest is what crosses over it. Add the two counts and you get 92: 50 bridges and 42 charted overhead cables over the packed run. The ratio is the part to sit with. On open water a bridge is the thing you plan for and a wire is incidental. Here there is very nearly one cable for every bridge, which is what happens on water narrow enough that stringing a line across it is cheap.
A bridge announces itself. You see it from a long way down the reach, it is named on the chart, and you have time to think about it. A cable is a different problem. It has no tender and no schedule, it goes flat against a treeline in bad light, and the clearance it gives you today is a charted figure with the pool stage working underneath it.
This is the number to get right before you leave the dock. Set your air draft in Helm once and the charted vertical clearance on every one of those 92 crossings is checked against it. Measure to the top of the highest fixed thing on the boat, then measure again with the antenna up, and use the taller figure. A sailboat deciding whether the stick comes down is making that decision against 42 wires rather than against one.
| In the chart pack | Count |
|---|---|
| Bridges | 50 |
| Overhead cables | 42 |
| Charted lights | 171 |
| Lock features | 12 |
| Charted depth areas | 52 |
| Depth contours | 55 |
| Charted obstructions | 4 |
| Charted wrecks | 1 |
| Restricted areas | 8 |
Counted from the Helm chart pack for the Ouachita River, built from the official inland electronic navigational charts published for it. The pack downloads at about 2 MB. Lock features are counted as the chart draws them, with chambers, gates and dams as separate objects.
The pack carries 12 charted lock features. That number counts chambers, gates and dams separately in the source data, so it describes features drawn on the chart rather than a count of facilities on the river. Columbia, Felsenthal, H.K. Thatcher and Jonesville are among the named ones it contains.
What a lock does to a day is not complicated, it is only not negotiable. The run is broken into pieces and each break costs whatever it costs. A tow locking through ahead of you has the chamber until it is finished with it, and nothing about your schedule changes that. Planning a river day on distance alone is how people end up feeling their way to a wall after dark.
Having the lock features on the chart means the approach is something you see coming rather than something you remember. That is worth more on a strange stretch than on a familiar one, but it is worth something on both.
171 charted lights over this run is a working number, and river lights are doing a different job from the ones on a bay. Nothing here is lighting an approach from seaward. They mark which side of the bend is holding the water, and they mark where the channel crosses from one bank to the other, which on a dark night is the thing you would otherwise find out by feel.
They come down with the pack and sit on the chart with everything else. The hour after sunset is when they earn it. The bank goes flat and every gap in the treeline starts to look like the next bend.
The pack holds 52 charted depth areas and 55 depth contours. On a pooled river those describe something different from what the same figures describe on a coast. Above a dam the water is held rather than tidal, so the depth question on a given morning is mostly a stage question, and the part of the chart you read closely is the shape of the channel through the bends.
Where the inland depth numbers come from has its own page on this site and is worth reading once. The short version on this river is that the channel is where the water has been kept and the inside of a bend is where the river has been putting sand. A line drawn on a screen is not a reason to go somewhere no tow has any use for.
The charted hazard list here is short. Four charted obstructions and one charted wreck in the whole pack, with 8 restricted areas alongside them. The restricted areas are drawn on the chart so you can see one before you are inside it.
Read the other two figures honestly. A short charted hazard list on a river is not a statement that the water is clean. What a river hands you arrived on the last rise and will be somewhere else after the next one, and a deadhead standing on end where nothing was last week never makes it onto any chart. The pack describes what has been charted, and charted data ages. Keep a lookout and verify locally.
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 Ouachita pack carries 12 charted lock features, and that figure counts chambers, gates and dams separately in the source data, so it describes what is drawn on the chart rather than a number of facilities. Columbia, Felsenthal, H.K. Thatcher and Jonesville are among the named ones it contains. They come down with the rest of the pack, so a lock approach is something you see on the chart while you still have room to slow for it. The chamber itself you still work on the radio.
That is an air draft question, and the pack gives you the count to plan against: 50 bridges and 42 charted overhead cables between 31.31 N and 33.63 N, which is 92 crossings in all. Set your air draft in Helm once and the charted vertical clearance on each of them is checked against that figure. The cables are the ones to take seriously. A cable has no tender and no schedule, and it disappears against a treeline until you are closer to it than you wanted to be.
It covers a box running from 31.31 N up to 33.63 N and from 92.85 W across to 91.77 W, in one download of about 2 MB. Once it is on the phone the chart is there with or without a signal, including the 171 charted lights and the 12 charted lock features. At 2 MB you can pull it down at the ramp on whatever bar of service you happen to have.
Helm Boating