While the world-class paddlers go at it down in Rio, I continue to do my own thing in the boat.
I wrote this post back on the first of March right after my trip to Hawaii that reduced to two the number of states I'd never been to. Those two states were Alaska and Rhode Island. Alaska will be a whole trip unto itself one day, but Rhode Island was very much in reach once I arrived in New England on this vacation. On Monday morning I said goodbye to John at his home in southern New Hampshire and headed east and south for The Ocean State.
A couple of hours later I crossed the state line, and could have been happy with that. But I want to be able to say I've done something meaningful in each state I've visited, and what's more meaningful than paddling a boat? So I continued on until I found myself on the bank of the Seekonk River at Pawtucket, Rhode Island.
From the public boat ramp I paddled upstream for a kilometer or so, but the river quickly became quite shallow and choked with algae. So I turned around and paddled toward the river's mouth at Naraganssett Bay. I saw a bridge off in the distance and decided that would be my turnaround point, but paddle as I may and paddle as I might it seemed to take an eternity to get there. When I finally rounded the bridge's pilings I saw eddy lines coming off them in the upstream direction, meaning that I'd been paddling against an incoming tide.
I paddled back toward my putin place with the help of that tidal current, but somewhere along the way it gave way to the river's downstream flow. Nice guys like me just never win. But I made it back to conclude a 70-minute paddle, and now I can sit here and type out the story for you.
I departed Pawtucket and headed back west across the state of Connecticut. Shortly after entering New York I took the exit for my buddy Rob's house in the town of Holmes (yes, really).
Rob and I became friends 23 years ago when we were teaching at a school in Mamaroneck, New York. I moved back home to Memphis after that school year, but we've stayed in touch and managed to get together once every eight years or so. Rob is now a chiropractor, and for that reason alone I wish I could see him a bit more often.
During my three-year residence in New York in the early 1990s I never got around to paddling a boat on the Hudson River, and yesterday I figured the time had come to make that right. Rob had the afternoon off, so we put his Carolina touring kayak on my car alongside my surf ski and headed over to the town of Peekskill. We put in at the municipal river access there and fought some wind and current to paddle upriver toward the Bear Mountain Bridge. I was feeling pretty good in the boat and after doing three 8-stroke sprints I had fun working on dynamic stability in the heavy chop. Once in a while I'd loop back around to check on Rob in his slower boat. I had my Go Pro camera mounted on the stern deck, set to take a still photo every thirty seconds, and I tried to paddle toward as many cool-looking things as I could to get them on digi-film. At this moment I'm not equipped to download those photos to my computer, but as soon as I can do so I'll share some here.
By the time we completed our 100-minute paddle the wind had abated and it was a beautiful partly-sunny day.
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