What to Expect if You Lock Through Watts Bar Dam—in a Canoe Going Upstream
In Outdoors, Voice in the Wilderness
by Kim Trevathan April 5, 2017Within a barge length or two of Watts Bar Nuclear Plant across the lake, I launched my canoe for the first time in over a year. Accustomed to riding low out of the wind in a kayak about half the canoe’s weight, I had to reset my paddling tactics when a headwind hooked the bow and flung me downstream, away from my goal: the lock of Watts Bar Dam, about a mile away.
Grizzled fishermen stared from the ramp as I let the boat pinwheel until I could get the bow pointed into the wind and start the constant frantic paddling necessary for making progress against the current and a 20 mph wind.
When I first began to research a canoe trip down the Tennessee River in 1998, people assured me that Jasper, my dog, and I would have no trouble locking through nine dams going downstream, sitting there as if in a series of enormous draining bathtubs. Just don’t lock through going upstream, more than one boater told me. I remember something said about the turbulence created when water is injected into the chamber, raising the level to the “upper” side of the dam, the lake side.