The Start of the Oostanaula River

I was looking at North Georgia rivers and stumbled across The Oostanaula River when viewing the "Paddle Georgia" website at http://www.garivers.org/paddle_georgia/.  Seems the 2016 float involved this river I had not heard about yet.  As for other "firsts", I was able to take out my shiny new red Malibu Kayaks Trio 11 on its maiden voyage.

This 11 mile route is fairly calm and reminded me of my "normal" river (see S2S - The Chattahoochee River from Source to Sea) and it looked great right out of the gate.

One big difference from The Hooch is that there are many fish weirs on this section which were created centuries ago by the Native Americans who lived in North Georgia.

Unlike The Hooch, The Etowah River and this one seemed to have almost no turtles which is why I was glad to find this one (yes, I saw only one the whole day).  You'll probably need to click on the picture below to see it full-size and notice the turtle that big red arrow is pointing to. 

Just before the four mile mark, we (as you'll see some folks if you look closely below) crossed under a train bridge and one for US Highway 41.

Who comprised the "we" I mentioned?  Well, it was still Brian's family who have joined me on several other adventures (including the recent trips down Dawson Forest Section of the Etowah River; Plus a Waterfall and Eagle's Break Section of the Etowah River).  This time Brian's wife, Amanda, joined the kids and Brian got to provide shuttle support for those of us on the river.  Thanks for the help, Brian!!

It was about this time the skies shifted from being cloudy to an almost clear blue sky.

We then came up upon some pretty cool rock formations – and even a sunken boat!

Even some rocks you could paddle up underneath!

Then we finally got just past the four mile mark and went underneath I-75.  We were puttering along at about 2 MPH by this point as it took us two hours to get here.

We paddled on, but it seemed Amanda picked up the pace.  At times, I was struggling to keep up.  We continued on and saw more weirs as well as lots of cool root systems with the river level being down a bit.

We also saw some more "wildlife" when we came across a cattle ranch on river left which included this big creature taking a little bath.

To my surprise we came upon the old abandoned Calhoun water intake that signaled we were at the tail end of our adventure which was followed by some more cool formations on river left just before the take out.

Amanda and her kids really picked up the pace as we ended up doing the other seven miles in the same amount of time as we did the first four in.  We finished the whole 11 miles right at four hours.  I'll have to admit it, my right shoulder hurt me the rest of the day!  All in all, another great day on the water and it was a pleasure to explore The Oostanaula River for the first time.