We went for our first big float of the year last week.
It was amazing.
We *finally* have friends and family with canoes, so it isn't always just me and Quinn anymore. This trip we got my brother, Aaron, his wife, Jenna, and some friends from church, Josh and Mary, to go with us. Josh did most of the initial planning, and since we all owned our own canoes we didn't have to work with campground and shuttle schedules because we did our own shuttling. It was time consuming, but saved a lot of money and trouble.
We went up to Montauk State Park at Salem- It was a bit of a drive so we started loading around 4am on Wednesday morning. It took us until almost 6 to get on the road, so we were glad we got an extra early start. The biggest challenge with getting onto the road was strapping Aaron's canoe onto his BMW. It was the first time we'd done that and his car had a pretty funky undercarriage compared to our other cars, so it took some work to figure out an effective system.
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| Gavin loved playing in the icy cold water while we girls loaded the canoes. He ended up drenched and wrapped in a towel for the first leg of the trip, but it exhausted him, so he also slept for the first leg of the trip. |
Once we were on the road it was a pretty straight shot. Q and I took point and I read directions while he drove. We made our way down little state highways and dirt roads until we hit Baptist Camp access, then we blitzed our unload. Everything was dumped on the ground by the cars and the guys carried the canoes to the water's edge, then headed out to leave two of the three cars at our take out for the first part of the shuttling.
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| Jenna with her little girl's frog (it came along so it could tell Della all about the trip) and Mary. |
It only took us girls about 40 minutes to sort and load all the gear and get it strapped into the boats. We'd never strapped our gear down before so I wasn't super sure as to how comfortable I was with the idea, but we ended up being very grateful that we had. We used our ratchet straps to make sure everything was as tight as it could be, then spent another 40 minutes hanging out at the boats talking about all sorts of girlish things while we waited for the shuttling to be finished. Way not the most exciting part of the trip, but a memory I'm glad to have.
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| Ready to head out- only pausing for a picture! |
Once the guys got back it only took about 10 minutes to be in the water, thanks to the sick organizational skills of their super women. Gavie was glad to strap into his life-vest, wrap up in a towel and his green fuzzy and doze off. The weather was perfect with the warm sun, cool breeze and scattered clouds.
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| Can't get your baby to sleep? Follow this recipe: 1 hour of sunshine and water, 1 gently rocking canoe, 5,000 singing birds, 1 gentle breeze and 1 cozy blanket. |
The first couple hours were challenging for all of us. Quinn and I had a 45 pound camping gear box, a 70 pound cooler and a 36 pack of sodas... it was a much heavier load then we had ever weighed the canoe down with and it was like starting from scratch with navigation. It took a lot more effort to direct the boat and I was completely incapable of countering his strokes with the same amount of effect on our trajectory. It was frustrating at first and we bumped around corners and drug through gravel that we wouldn't have touched with just our 3 people in the boat, but we caught on pretty quickly.
In the past my job has been to spot rocks and logs in the water for us to go around- with the canoe so loaded it became more important to spot which side of the river was deepest then to find the easiest route.
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| Springtime on the river is the only thing better than autumn on the river... |
Like I said, it was different.
Josh and Mary were also dealing with a fully loaded boat for the first time, and Aaron and Jenna had never actually floated as a team, so the other couples had as much fun with the first stretch as we did. ;)
Our first lunch break was much needed. We'd been munching on granola bars and pizza rolls all morning, but loading and paddling are a lot of work, so we were pretty hungry. We got a fire going, stuck hot dogs on skewers and ate. A lot. Chips, hot dogs, and sodas and we were good to go again...after a swimming break.
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| Gavin and Jenna enjoying our first lunch break. |
About mid afternoon we crashed for another swim stop. Aaron was having a hard time breathing due to a respiratory bug and ended up sleeping in the middle of a gravel bar for about 20 minutes while the rest of us swam, ate snacks and caught crawdads. A few minutes after that stop we passed Aker's Ferry, which was our 15 mile mark, so right about half way. We kept going another hour or two and stopped around dusk. Gavin was acting a bit chilled so Quinn and I were pretty motivated to get the fire going and get him changed into dry clothes. He was pretty happy to be dry and clean again and we were pretty happy that we had expedited the dinner process.
Dinner was amazing- we sauteed onions and peppers, warmed up chili and broiled brats, then loaded it all up with all the cheese and ketchup we wanted. Dr Pepper, Roasted marshmallows, chocolate and twizzlers followed, along with way too many jokes from way too much sugar and way too tired people. The fire burned down and we all headed to bed except Quinn, who sat up until after 2am to keep the fire stoked up and make sure we weren't going to be plagued with pesky black bears and coons.
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| Breakfast time! |
Breakfast came early- I woke at 5:45 and kicked into gear. By 6:30 we had the fire going and coffee on. With the birds singing and the sun rising it felt so natural to be up and going. Breakfast was epic- more sauteed onions and peppers, scrambled eggs, cheese, salsa, potatoes and sausage all wrapped up into burritos. Wow. We felt good after that. We broke down camp and were on the river again at about 8am.
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| Floating in the morning. Enjoying life with my wonderful boys! |
Floating for the morning was very relaxed. We passed Cave Spring, which made the river wide and fast and it was easy going. We did have to portage around a downed log. The group in front of us had tried to go through the small part of the river that was going over one end of the log and one of their group had been trapped underneath it when her canoe ended up pinned against it. It scared them pretty bad and they had marked it carefully. It was very similar to
the log that Quinn and I got stuck on two years ago and there's no way we would have risked it, but we were grateful for all of their warning flags anyway.
Lunch was low key- a quick fire on a small gravel bank and hot dogs on skewers. We loaded them with cheese and pigged out on chips then headed out again.
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| Lunch Break on day two- note the frog on Aaron's shoulder. |
The entire first 33 miles was relaxed and fun and accident free. Aaron rolled out of the canoe into the water once to keep a log from tipping him and Jenna in, and both Aaron and Jenna and Josh and Mary took on quite a bit of water along the way, but it was uneventful.
Headed out from lunch Jenna made the comment that someone was gonna dump their canoe a mile from the end, just because the start had been so good.
And yes.
It happened.
Coming around a corner we were following the faster, outside current, about 20 yards behind Aaron and Jenna. Josh and Mary were only a few feet behind us and we were happily discussing The Phantom of the Opera when I realized the the stump we were going around was actually a log that was stretched across the entire outside edge of the river, about 6 inches under water. We turned hard and fast and only about 4 inches of our canoe was actually scraping the stump but we had turned our nose enough that the side current was starting to splash into the boat, then a slight bump from Josh and Mary and we swamped. Our boat was instantly full and Josh and Mary's was lodged on the stump.
The second water started coming in I got out. It felt like one motion- feet on the ground and Gavin and his chair completely wrapped up close to me. The dry box was in the water next to me so I grabbed that and headed to shore. It was about 25-30 feet to the other side, and about half way the water was fast and waist deep. There was a lot of super human action going on at that moment.
Quinn, in 8 foot deep water and not a good swimmer was able to drag the canoe full of water to shore less then 10 feet below the stump we hit. He's not a good swimmer and the water was very fast, so nobody is sure how that happened, but it did. With almost everything still in the canoe.
Aaron, 20 yards downstream, saw me in the middle of the river with Gavin and our canoe full of water and was out of his boat in an instant and lifted the canoe and all 300 pounds of Jenna and camping gear up a 3 foot sheer bank onto dry land by shouldering it, then was back in the middle of the river grabbing floating gear before I made all the way back to land.
Josh, with Mary, who does not swim, in the water in her lifejacket and hanging onto the front of the canoe, was standing in a 3 foot fast current and not letting his canoe full of water move downstream towards Quinn who was getting ours pulled onto land. He held it there for a looong time while everyone got to shore.
I was barefoot and carrying 40 pounds of Gavin, chair, dry box, soaked blanket and soaked towel - Mommy adrenaline totally won out and I don't know how I made it so far so fast, but Gavin was the first person in the group to be on dry ground. The only moment I was actually terrified was when the waist deep water knocked me to my knees. Without Gavin I would have let the water carry me to a shallower spot, but I wasn't sure I could keep him above water if I did that while holding him, so I had to get up and keep going. I was muttering a prayer and looked over my shoulder at Quinn who had the canoe and a LOT of water between me and him, so I looked downstream where Aaron was in his canoe looking at me, so I yelled at him...something... I don't know what...then I got up and kept going. I think having his baby sister in the water with her baby and yelling his name had something to do with him shouldering 400 pounds... just maybe...
And Mary... Mary spent all that time in the water in her flip flops and kept BOTH of them on her feet the entire time. To me, that was the most impressive feat. Seriously. That was awesome.
Jenna, this whole time, was catching and collecting all the stuff that Aaron was gathering from the center of the river and catching everything that was out of his reach in the shallows. Between the two of them they got the huge majority of it.
Anywho, Josh and Mary eventually let the canoe move down river where Aaron pulled it ashore and bailed it out, then moved it across to the bank that Jenna was on where Josh and Mary had swam too. A group of old dudes who had been a few minutes behind us came along and a couple of them let me climb into their canoe with Gavin and deposited me with the others, since I was barefoot and my feet were bleeding from the gravel (yuck) and Quinn cut the top off of a water jug, bailed out our canoe, then used the jug to paddle down to Aaron who was standing in the middle of the river with a paddle so Quinn could get to the same bank as the rest of us.
The group of old guys had stopped and they were collecting the few things Aaron hadn't caught- a few shoes and Gavin's toy dinosaur. They kept going after they dropped those things on our bank, and kept collecting stuff as they moved downstream. Because all the gear and coolers had been strapped in we lost almost nothing in the long run. One of Gavin's $2 water shoes and one of Mary's shoes,
A mile later we were at the take out.... soaked and exhausted but with everything that mattered and a lot of great memories.
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| Our group- this is the version that Jenna took. I took a version that included her. Gavin was asleep in the canoe. |
We're planning a single day float for next week. I can't wait to be back on the water!!
Signing out-
Joanna
