Scoping out the locks on the Red River

For anyone considering racing in Tour de la Rivière Rouge or 410 de Louisiane, one of the most daunting features – apart from the distances, 275 miles for Rivière Rouge and of course 410 miles for the 410 – has to be encountering five big modern sets of locks and dams on the Red River.
Wednesday, Ray Pellerin and I took a close look at one of them, the one at Colfax (officially Lock & Dam No. 3), and the news is good.
For one thing, the lock can be filled or emptied in about 10 minutes, a good deal faster than the 100-plus-year-old Keystone Lock on Bayou Teche near St. Martinville – which is one of the reasons we mandate a portage there during Tour du Teche 135.
For Rivière and the 410, the choice of whether to portage or lock through is entirely up to each team. If the lock operator doesn’t see you coming and start the process of opening, there’s an air horn hanging on the approach wall to signal your presence. Or you can call them on your cell phone. The numbers will be provide in the race packet.
The lock operators customarily keep the lock open if they can see more traffic coming – at Colfax they have about a two-mile vista.
You don’t have to tie up in the lock but you are required to loop a line over the floating mooring bitt and hang off of it. You can’t just hold onto it with your hand, so have a line ready. (Note: There are also stationary bitts along the lock’s inner walls. Not a good idea to hang off one of them for obvious reasons.)
Going through a lock and dam is like a bucket-list experience for boaters. (I got mine out of the way over 20 years ago on a jet-boat cruise down the Tennessee River for Boating magazine.) But if might be a little maddening if you’ve got five minutes on your nearest competitor, say, and you catch the lock at the downstream level. On the other hand, it’s an opportunity to catch a little rest – not a small matter on a 275-mile straight-through race.
If you choose to portage, do it on the lock side, not the dam side. You can take out right by the operator’s station and put back in just beyond the lock, a distance of about 1,000 feet. At Colfax you’ll encounter brush, mud, cantaloupe-size rocks, and a fairly steep but not too high bank. No hill for a stepper, as they say.
The five sets of locks and dams are all close in size if not exactly the same. You are welcome to scout them out yourselves. Just check in with the staff in the operator’s station.
For more information about these and other Tour du Teche races, go to www.tourduteche.com.