I've spent this week wandering--sometimes aimlessly, sometimes with great purpose--around New England.
The summertime daylight hours up here are rather interesting. Because this locale is farther north than my home, the daylight lasts longer each day, and because this is the absolute easternmost reach of the United States (Maine's capital city of Augusta is nearly 5 degrees farther east than New York City, and nearly 11 degrees farther east than Miami), that extra daylight is "front-loaded" into the early morning hours. Dawn occurs around 4:30 AM EDT, and it's broad daylight by 5 o'clock.
I've paddled twice this week. On Tuesday evening I attended the weekly "sandlot" race at the Boston suburb of Beverly, Massachusetts. Eight or nine other people were there, including (but not limited to) Greg Lesher, Matt Drayer, Mary Beth Gangloff, Bernie Romanowski, and Eli Gallaudet. We raced a triangular course of nearly 5 miles (my G.P.S. device measured it at 7.96 kilometers). We did it in staggered starts, and as a result I was all alone out there until very late in the race when Eli caught me and then we both caught a guy who had started before us. It might have been fun to see who I could hang with in a head-to-head start, but I can understand why they like to do the staggered starts, too. My time (not counting the sprints on the beach at the start and finish) was 44:43, with an average speed a little under 11 kph. That's slower than I've been doing on flatwater in the harbor at home, and even though the conditions there near the mouth of the Crane River were pretty calm, I guess they were bumpy enough to slow me down a bit.
I'd hoped to meet up with old slalom-racing friend John Kazimierczyk for some whitewater paddling in western Massachusetts on Wednesday, but that morning he told me that the water levels over there were not cooperating and he was going to stay in. So I decided to head on up to Maine, a state I had not visited since we took a family vacation there when I was maybe 8 or 9 years old, and a state I had never paddle in. Having studied the river flow situation on the American Whitewater website, I decided the Kennebec River drainage might be my best bet for some whitewater paddling. I drove up to a town called The Forks, right at the confluence of the Kennebec and Dead Rivers, and found myself in a campsite right on the bank of the Dead. The area had just received some two and a half inches of rain, so all the rivers and creeks had good healthy flows.
Camping nearly was a group of paddlers from upstate New York who were planning to run the Kennebec Gorge, and they kindly welcomed me along. The Kennebec Gorge is a mostly Class III run with a little bit of Class IV, and it's one of the standard summertime whitewater runs in Maine because of its dam-released flows. I felt pretty good out there, albeit still not as sharp as in my much more dedicated whitewater days.
The Gorge run is only three miles or so, with a takeout that requires carrying your boat up a long, steep set of stairs. I chose to continue paddling the additional six or so miles down to the confluence with the Dead. As the river emerged from the gorge the whitewater gradually calmed down, but there was still plenty of fun Class II-III to mess around on.
This morning I'm feeling surprisingly not too sore. Maybe my body is actually getting used to that stuff again.
My eight-day class at the Maine Coast Craft School begins tomorrow, so my main plan for today is to make sure I've got the food and supplies I'll need for the next week. I've never visited the school before, so I won't know what the exact situation will be until I get there, but I reckon it's better to be over-prepared than under-prepared. The school officials tout the place as being somewhat off the grid, so readers probably shouldn't count on any more posts here until July 29 at the earliest.
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