Courtesy of Big Muddy Adventures
Big Muddy took a lucky handful of St. Louisans to see last sumer's eclipse from the water.
At the next full moon, on Saturday, March 31, you could climb into a long voyageur canoe with 14 likeminded souls, paddle to an island in the Mississippi, and watch chef Josh Galliano (now of Companion Bakery, formerly exec chef at Libertine, Food & Wine's “People's Best New Chef, Midwest" in 2012) test his cookout skills on your worked-up appetite. Or, for $65 instead of $85, you could paddle to the same island on Friday, March 30, and listen to live music while somebody from Big Muddy Adventures cooks for you.
They’re not James Beard contendees, concedes general manager Roo Yawitz, “but we do know how to make pretty good food over a campfire. Anything that can be prepared on a completely wild, uninhabited island in the middle of the river.”
Big Muddy does these Full Moon Floats once a month, 4 – 10 p.m., through fall. It also runs
- two daytime trips a month up in Alton: on a Sunday from Piasa Creek to the Alton Marina and on a Saturday from the Grafton Marina to Piasa Creek.
- St. Louis Riverfront Adventures on Monday and Wednesday mornings. You park on the slanted bricks of the levee, get shuttled 9 miles up the North Riverfront Park, and canoe back down to the Arch.
- A French Corridor Expedition on May 25 from Friday morning through Sunday evening
- Custom trips for friends having an informal high school or college reunion; bachelorette parties; showing off St. Louis to relatives visiting from out of town, you name it.
No paddling experience is necessary: “All you have to be able to do is follow the directions—‘Paddle’ or ‘Stop paddling’—called out by whoever’s in the back of the canoe.”
Yawitz’s favorite custom trip so far was a three-day sojourn from St. Charles to the Arch with a group of young Iraq and Afghanistan military vets from Sheep Dog Impact Assistance.
“It was April, and the river was so high, the island where we were going to camp was under water. We floated into the back area—when the Missouri floods, the rivers meet at a different place—and found an octagonal, 35-foot life raft, completely inflated, that looked like something that’d come off an airliner. It had come off one of the casino boats. The guys said, ‘This is our mission for the trip. We are going to rescue this life raft.’ They paddled it all the way down to North Riverfront Park, at flood stage.” Everybody kept their life jackets on, he adds firmly. “We take these rivers very seriously. That day, the river was probably running at 1 million cubic feet of water per second.”
Big Muddy’s planning more pop-up trips and forming alliances with rock climbing and mountain biking outfitters. “We’re trying to build a little coalition,” Yawitz says. “There’s so much you can do here and nobody knows it.”
Photography courtesy of Big Muddy Adventures
