>>1017603As someone who lives right near the Mississippi in the Midwest, I wouldn't want to be out in the main channel in a kayak and I wouldn't want to be on it at all in a canoe.
The combination of very powerful currents anywhere near the hydroelectric dams and shitheads in powerboats make it dangerous under ideal conditions, add in bad weather and it can be near suicide.
In many places you really can't even hug the shore due to copious amounts of random debris/trash, plus the backwake from barges bouncing off the shore is far harder to predict and thus handle than the actual wake.
I duck hunted on the Mississippi via boat for close to 12 years with a 22ft jon boat+20hp outboard, in that time I got outright rammed twice by shithead party boaters in broad daylight and got stuck in a squall bad enough I couldn't make headway against the wind+current with a fucking gas engine. I also had to rescue a commercial fisherman that was about to get sucked through a hydro dam due to engine failure, and my ~10 mile stretch of river kills about a dozen people every year due to accidents or bad weather. Many of them seasoned commercial trotliners in big (27-32ft) center-console boats.
>mfw my second year some jackass in a ski boat with 3 big fucking >200hp outboards went rocketing upriver past my blind outside the channel>mfw I had just enough time to think "hey, isn't there an old wing dam in front of him?" before he hit it at warp fuck and his fiberglass/plastic boat pretty much explodedI'm assuming he didn't survive, neither myself nor the Coast Guard found a body/person in the 3 hours I helped look.
