116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
A Wapsi adjusment
Wild Side column: Boards made river low for a bit, but no issue for author
I’m the inverse of Hoyt Axton’s “Wild Bull Rider,” who said, “The higher they get is a little too low for me.”
When it comes to walking on roofs or wading the Wapsipinicon, “the lower it gets is a little too high for me.”
I can stay off roofs, but I can’t stay out of the river.
Which is why I always look forward to the annual big drop when the PROW group (Preserving Recreation and Habitat on the Wapsi) puts boards atop the dam in Independence.
The boards, installed during low flows, deepen the upstream impoundment to keep motor boats from running aground. With the boards in place (Sept. 4 this year), the water level rises above the dam and falls steeply below it, typically, but just temporarily, yielding the lowest levels and easiest wading of the season.
Of course the river does not just dry up like the Red Sea at Moses’s bidding. It merely has less water to transport.
PROW spokesman Josh Coonrad of Independence said it takes about 12 hours for the water to resume flowing over the boards. Within 24 hours the gauge at Independence registers the same height as it did before the big drop.
When I checked the gauge on the evening of Sept. 4, the river had rapidly fallen 4 inches, and I knew the boards were up and the big drop was under way.
When you’re used to seeing it drop maybe a tenth of an inch a day during a dry spell, a sudden 4-inch drop is a big deal.
The following morning, 10 miles downstream of the gauge, wet banks above the water and islands that a day earlier had been under water showed the extent of the drop.
So did flopping minnows on recently dewatered sandbars and beached mussels whose slow-moving single feet could not keep pace with the rapid river drop.
Avian predators seemed more animated than usual as they scrambled to take advantage of low water opportunities.
Great blue herons, who normally keep their distance from me, seemed loathe to leave their ambush sites upon my approach. Ospreys and belted kingfishers smacked the water at intervals more frequent than usual.
While they targeted the shallows, I tossed my lures into the deepest water I could find, where fish of many species congregated to ride out the drop.
By the time the sun rose above the shoreline trees, ending my outing, I’d caught smallmouth, largemouth and rock bass, as well as walleyes, northerns and quillback carpsuckers, not to mention scales dislodged from the backs of rough fish who couldn’t get out of the way.
As I hiked downstream a stick I’d shoved in the sand an hour earlier at water’s edge showed the river was climbing again.
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