A Rare Naugatuck Trip

 

After a week of showing and driving artwork around, I finally have time to put the canoe in the water. I put in from O' Sullivan's Island, which lies at the confluence of the Naugatuck and Housatonic Rivers. The tide is unusually high, and while it is an hour past down where I paddle more often, this far up the river, with the lag of some 10 miles, the river height is probably peaking. In fact, O' Sullivan's is just barely awash in many places that would normally be a foot and a half above the water at high tide.

Witness the new glow in the dark drysuit.

It is 40F and the water is in the upper 50's. Today marks the first day of winter paddling - it is the first day for me to put on my drysuit, which is brand new after trading in my old suit after 11years and some 400-500 days of use.  In Connecticut, I can paddle most of the winter and I am in a drysuit from November until sometime in April.

The brush pile hides a beaver bank burrow

I head up the Naugatuck. I've only gone up the Naugatuck a coupe times before. The right side of the river is a 30 ft tall boulder levy that was built after a huge 1955 flood. It isn't much to look at. About a mile up, the river has a short section of shallow fast water that stopped me in the past, and with the ugly levy, working around it wasn't worth the effort. Today, the tide has flooded the fast water out, and the upstream paddle is easy. Just short of 2 miles up, the river goes shallow. I spot some beaver gnawings, but no place that would work for a lodge or bank burrow. Then, I cross over to the far side looking for a deep channel, but there isn't one. At any normal high tide, this would be a gravel bar with the river trickling through. There is about 300 yards of this before reaching a bank to bank ledge, some 2 feet high. But, there is a bank burrow on a small island just below the ledge. There is at least another mile of river above the ledge until reaching a dam, but without doing some reconnaissance, I can't justify the portage. Also, in a half hour, I would have to portage the 300 yards of gravel. Time to retreat. 

I get back to my put-in and continue up the Housatonic. I spot a few Great Blue Herons and my first Bufflehead of the season. I go up as far as the island below the Shelton Dam, and return via the other side of the river.