Yelm resident Andrew Joyce and friend David Rochelle are kayaking the length of the Mississippi River. Their kayaks are shown waiting on a sandbar while one of the Mississippi's famous riverboats floats by.
David Rochelle and Yelm Resident Anthony Joyce are kayaking the full length of the Mississippi River. Rochelle is pictured here at a riverside camping spot along the way.
David Rochelle, left, and Yelm resident Anthony Joyce planned their kayak trip along the length of the Mississippi River for a full year.
David Rochelle and Yelm Resident Anthony Joyce, not pictured, are kayaking the full length of the Mississippi River.
Yelm resident Anthony Joyce is about halfway through kayaking the Mississippi river from top to bottom, a trip he left on just days after he retired from 33 years as an Army dentist.
“I felt the trip would be a good segue into retirement, into civilian life,” Joyce said. “I have a friend named David who wanted to do it his whole life and he was waiting for me to have enough time to do it with him.”
Joyce and David Rochelle, buddies for 20 years, have kayaked together in paces that include Mexico, the Everglades, Oahu, the South Carolina coast and the Georgia coast. This trip is no different than all of those, except it could take up to four months, and the two planned it for an entire year, said Linda Joyce, Joyce’s wife.
She said they plan trips all the time. For instance, in addition to the four months on this adventure, the two will be gone two months next year, and want to be gone for six months the following year. However, she said that if she has any say in it, her husband will not be gone six months.
“That’s a deployment,” she said.
Still, Joyce’s trip down the Mississippi started off without a hitch, he said, beginning in St. Paul, with the goal of ending in New Orleans.
“Starting out was great,” Joyce said. “We started in Minnesota and the foliage was so pretty. There were bluffs with big trees on them and more wildlife than where we are now. There were lots of eagles, so many that we stopped pointing them out. We realized they were everywhere.”
Linda Joyce said that the buddies were going to camp along the river the whole way down, but that goal didn’t come to fruition.
“The problem they are running into is flooding,” she said. “They were going to camp on sandbars, but if the waters raise even one foot, then their sandbars disappear.”
She said that Joyce told her that if there is flooding or a heavy rainfall in a place like Wisconsin, the waters in all the states south of it will be affected.
So instead of camping on sandbars the whole time, they have had to resort to staying in hotels and campgrounds, she said.
As of last Thursday, Sept. 20, the duo were only 50 to 60 miles away from Cairo, Illinois, the halfway point of their journey. From there they face 800 more miles of adventure.
Other than the river flooding over their sandbars, the kayakers haven’t had much in the way of adversity, that is unless relentless clouds of mosquitoes count.
On the other side of the coin, Joyce said he has run into a string of very humbling experiences.
“The best thing that has happened this trip is we came to understand the kindness of strangers,” he said.
People they didn’t know from Adam gave them fresh produce on one occasion, and a woman brought them some water bottles after they found out that the town didn’t have a store.
The list goes on.
“At a campground we were staying at, one of our neighbors asked us what we were going to do next,” Joyce said. “When we told him that we were going to try to find a way into town to find a place to do laundry, he gave us the keys to his truck.
“What I gather from this is how most people, people in general, are very nice.”
