Potomac

Ran this on sunday around 9 on the gauge just after low tide -- 100,000 CFS. Pretty hairy to look at it from Chain Bridge. Where the observation deck was there is a rather large hole. Definitely don't want to end up there. Below the observation deck, maybe 40 yards or so, near the center of the river there is a feature that I can only describe as an exploding wave hole. It would look like a regular wave train, of course with massive waves, but every minute or two an enormous column of water the size of a truck would shoot up into the air. It was so big that we could see it from 500 yards away coming downriver. Needless to say, that must be avoided at all costs. When we were scouting from the bridge we saw a large log get completely eaten up by that thing. The only real safe line at this level is to go far river right, which has an extremely chaotic eddy line with all kinds of mystery boils, reactionary waves, and squirrelly water. It's the kind of water where you can be going straight and all of a sudden be facing sideways five feet to the left or right of where you were. It's a little bit cleaner if you go center-left, but then the exploding wave hole is in play. The pillars for Chain Bridge are, as a previous poster noted, a deathtrap if you get caught in them at this flow. Whether in your boat or out, the pillars must be avoided. Just below the bridge there is a large breaking wave, maybe 10 feet tall, followed by a series of large rollers. Fun. There were fun waves almost all the way down to Fletcher's Boathouse at this level/tide. The flow was so fast that we covered the mile from Chain Bridge to Fletcher's Boathouse in about five minutes. A swim at this level would be long, cold, and potentially deadly.