Out with the Boys

I meet K and G at the Pond Brook put-in.  We only know each other from an online canoe forum and G threw out the idea of a daytrip with whoever lives in the area. It is an excellent day with a bit more wind than we'd like, but it is out of the north, so with any luck it will still be at our back on the return.

Three solo canoes head out, down the brook/cove and downrive and around the point, which puts us in the Shephaug reach. It is a steady headwind all of the way up to the last couple bends, where the reservoir nears the natural level of the river and the forest closes in some. We take a good long break on the rocks below the cascades. This gives us some time to get to know each other. G lives just a few miles away, K traveled an hour and a half to get here. My drive is an hour of 30 and 40 mph roads.

We follow the river-right shore on the way back, and given the holiday weekend, we are surprised at the lack of boat traffic. The wind has died down and it is a fairly quiet and pleasant trip.  Only as we near the Housatonic do we pick up some more motorboat traffic, but even then it is still not too bad. 

Windy Morning

I put in at the top of the tidal section of the Housatonic from a rather rundown island that is reached by driving through a rundown industrial area that is better suited for someplace away from the river.  I occasionally start from here to avoid the stiffer tidal currents in the lower river.

I head downstream planning to go as far as Wooster Island.  There is a good stiff wind coming straight down the river at 10 to 15 mph.  

I spot a Great Blue Heron, an Osprey, which takes a dive at the Heron, and a juvenile Bald Eagle, all within the first 15 minutes. 

This is a post-industrial river landscape. After a few minutes, the river is in the bottom of a tall forested valley with any buildings well up and away from the river.  The river bank, however, does show the history.  Mush of it is rip-rapped or fortified. Sometimes it is quarry waste rock, sometimes it is old building material, in places there are old wooden sea walls. I pass an old rotting pier, and a wing dam of boulders.  

I notice the mature Bald Eagle as I pass under.  It flies to the other side of the river before I can get my camera. Then, another juvenile Bald Eagle.

I turn back at the gravel quarry, about a third of my planned distance.  There is no hiding from the wind, which seems determined to come straight down the river.  It is still early and if the wind gets a few miles an hour faster, it will be a grind to return.  Even so, the return is almost twice as long as it took to get here.

I continue past my start point up as far as the island just below the Derby Dam.  This is all old water-powered mill area and there are several old mill water exits - arched stone tunnels. 

A short day, but I have a pie to bake. 

Pequabuck

I'm back in the same area that I paddled two days ago, just a short mile above the dam that I paddled up to that day, but on a different river, the Pequabuck.  It has been at least a couple years since I've been in here.

I put in at the bottom of the steep bank just below the Meadow Road bridge.  The river looks a bit low, but not too bad.  I head upstream.

The Pequabuck is a skinny and twisty river.  It seems rare to paddle more than five or six canoe lengths without having to turn a sharp meander.  The current is a 2:1 with occasional pooling and a few fast spots, but the bottom is usually sandy and suitable for wading.  About a half mile up, I have an awkward step-over to negotiate.  I thought about it for a few minutes, and finally got to work cutting out a bit of tangle so that I could stand on the deadfall and drag the canoe over. 

The sand bars on the inside of the bends show lots of animal tracks.  I would have cast some except I left my casting kit in the car.  There are enough tracks that I bet I could find a spot where I could cast 2 or 3 different species in one casting.  It is mostly raccoon, opossum, deer and other small rodent types.  But, at one bend where there is slack water and a bottom of firm silt, bear tracks.  This was a bit of a surprise, but they weren't cat tracks, they weren't canine tracks, and 4 inches wide, there's only one animal in New England that it could be.  I wouldn't have noticed these submerged prints if there had only been one or two. But, it seems that the bear walked around  and left dozens of prints. 

It takes about an hour to get up to the next bridge.  I've been here before and it is as I remember it 75 yards of narrow fast water with lots of overhanging brush and branches, and one deadfall that can be ducked.  This section gets waded, both upstream and down. It is an easy walk on the inside of the bend.

Above that, it is more meanders until I get to a deadfall that is just too much effort. It is a catalpa tree and catalpa trees make the best strainers.  Catalpas are 30 foot tall trees that look like giant bushes - twisting bent branches in all directions.  When they fall in the what they strain every loose piece of wood that comes their way. Anyway, I don't feel like engineering my way through the mess, so I turn back.  Just below this spot is some old beaver sign - remains of a lodge and a drag.  Below, I thought I had smelled castoreum, but with no beaver sign anywhere on the trip, I figured it to be a smell-alike of some sort.

Old beaver sign

I see a few Spotted Sandpipers, some Wood Ducks, and one Green Heron that escorts me for a quarter mile or so.

I continue past my start point down to the Farmington River.  It is a short distance down to the dam, then I paddle back.  

 

Farmington, from the Really Old Occupation Site

I haven't been on the Farmington in, maybe, two years.  It seems time to make a visit.

I set out from beneath the new bridge at Old Farms Road.  The bridge is two or three years old. Prior to construction, the archaeology survey discovered a 12,500 year old occupation site and recovered `15,000 artifacts.  The date of this site means that the inhabitants were there not long after the ice age glacier had receded from the local area.

I head upstream against a 2 to 1 current - that means my return will take half as long. I almost always paddle out-n-back routes and thinking of currents in a time ratio is far more useful than any other method. The water level is down, but not extremely so. There is plenty of room to maneuver around shallows. Right away I spot 20 Common Mergansers.  I would guess that one or two are adult females and the remainder are juveniles hatched this year. Juveniles and females look pretty much the same once the young are close to adult size.

This is a "tuber" river... most users plop a boat or inner tube in the water and float downstream. Fortunately, that is for the most part a weekend activity. I have the river to myself. In fact, I will see no one else on the water.

I surprise a Green Heron from less than a canoe length.  Instead of flying off, it tucks under a root ball at the river's edge, and avoids a photograph. I spot a second one farther up, but it stays out of camera range.

I flush a mature Bald Eagle.  It flies upriver and perches, until I near again.  Then, it flushes and flies upriver and out of sight. Add to that, a few Great Blue Herons and several Kingfishers, and some small Sandpipers.

Nearing the old dam, I have to wade a few times with either the current being too strong or the water being too shallow as it runs over gravel bars.  In the slack water to the side of the dam, I find some wild rice and a decent crop of wapato.  I never noticed this on previous trips.

Wapato - AKA Broadleaf Arrowhead

It took 2 hours to reach the dam.  I could portage and continue up, but the next section pretty much warrants a daytrip on its own.  So, I eddy hop across the fast water below the dam, and then head back down.

It is an easy and quick trip with nothing to add other than flushing a half dozen Wood Ducks along the way.  Oh, and I collect a yellow float toy that had gotten wrapped around a deadfall in the river.  I field dress it onsite, eviscerating it and removing a couple gallons of water before bringing it into the canoe. There is something satisfying about cutting into lost inflatables. 

 

Through the Maze, Again

S doesn't have a lot of free time, so we head across town to the friendly neighborhood marsh. The tide is high enough to use the refuge launch and duck the motorheads.  We head down the shoreline just to check out the trees where the Egrets and Night Herons like to perch.  There are at least ten Snowy Egrets with just a couple Night Herons.  Then, we head back and take the channel that leads across the marsh, making frequent diversions around the many islands and exploring a couple of channels as we go.  

The tide is high and still rising. It is in the upper 70's with a steady SW breeze and mostly clear sky. 

We head into the Nell's Island maze where we flush a good number of juvenile Night Herons, a couple mature Yellow Crowned Night Herons, and three Great Blue Herons.  We make it through the maze with only one bad turn. It is pretty good bird watching considering the high tide that keeps most of the Herons back in the grasses.

Back in Nell's Channel, we cut across the channel and head into an opening that I've not tried before.  Usually, such things peter out, but this one just keeps going and we paddle a meandering circle coming back to Nell's Channel not to far below were we started.

On our way back to our start point, we divert briefly to the Central Phragmites Patch where we flush three Black Crowned Night Herons. 

The Quad Islands

It's too nice of a morning to not go out. It's also too nice of a morning to put in where the motorboat types are.  I set out on the Housatonic from the Park Formerly known as the Feral Cat Park.  A couple years ago, the town removed the dilapidated picnic shelter that housed dozens of feral cats. The cats are gone as well.

The tide is coming in and the river current is reversed.  I crab across the main channel to Pope's Flat, follow the edge of that island down, cross over to Carting Island and follow that shore.  I find an embedded glass jar and stop to collect it.  If I remember right, this is this is the only embedded bottle that I have found in the Quad Islands.  The location is directly across the channel from the lower pair of fuel storage tanks at the power plant - 1000 ft from the lower tip of Carting Island.  It is 8 inches deep and seems to be a condiment or instant coffee jar.

I head down to the draw bridge and there, I decide to spend my time in the islands and avoid the motor traffic. 

Between Carting and Peacock Islands, I flush a pair of Green Herons.  Great Egrets are perched in nearby trees with a Great Blue Heron, and I get overflown by three or four juvenile Night Herons. 

Green Heron between Carting and Peacock Islands

Coming down the west side of Peacock, I poke into a small creek drainage.  I haven't been in here for a few years.  I flush about twenty Night Herons and a couple Great Egrets, a bit of a surprise for me.

I head back out, and run a circuit through the islands before cutting across from Pope's Flat back to my starting point. 

Salmon River

I put in at the bottom of Salmon Cove.  It is a beautiful day, one of the best of the summer.  The sky is a clear and stark blue.  The temperature is about70F as I start and there is a pleasant breeze out of the north. What surprises me is the level of the water.  It seems to be about 2 feet higher than I what I expected it would be.  Some of the pond lilies and pickerel weed leaves are submerged.

The vegetation is particularly lush this summer.  We haven't had any mid-summer floods this year and the marsh plants seem to be loving it.  Pickerel weed is still in bloom as are many of the other plants that I don't know the names of... lots of reds and purples today. The wild rice is not ripe, but it seems to be doing well. The wild grapes are long gone - In case you are wondering, they taste okay but there seems to be only a day between when they are hard and bitter to when they go soft and flavorless... not worth any effort to collect. 

Pickerel weed with bees

The water is high enough to cross the beaver dam below Dibble Creek, but there is a solid wall of cattails that object and I can't get within 15 feet of the dam.

The view looking skyward past the overhanging trees is remarkable with the sky such a clear and brilliant blue. 

There are quite a few Great Blue Herons and Great Egrets.  I'll spot 10 or 12 of each during the trip. 

I head up the river to the Leesville Dam, leaving the main channel to go around the backside of a couple of the islands.  There is almost no current until just below the dam and ALL of the boulders that are in the river channel are well under water. I find wapato in bloom among the cattails in the smaller channels.

I return using the culvert route.  

I head into Pine Brook.  There was a large patch of wild rice in here that was wiped out by mid-summer flooding two years ago.  The water was high enough to submerge the rice plants and they did not go to seed.  Last year, there was almost no wild rice.  Today, about a fifth of the original patch has wild rice growing on it, which I think is pretty good considering the limited seed source. 

Pine Brook - the light green water plant is wild rice. 
Where the canoe is in this photo will eventually be all wild rice.

Just before the top of the cove, an adolescent Bald Eagle overflies me.

I cut across the top of the cove and head up the Moodus.  Just past the submerged beaver dam, I spot concentric waves coming from the bank.  Something that I did not see dove.  A few second later and a large beaver about 15 yards up slaps its tail and dives.  I pull up and wait to see if the beaver will come back up.  With bad eyesight, beaver often resurface and swim slowly at a distance while trying to catch a scent and figure out what disturbed them.  It doesn't come back up, so I continue up to the blocking deadfall a couple hundred feet below the mill pond dam.

On the way back, I spot a second smaller beaver.  This one stays on the surface for awhile, and with the wind in its favor, it surely caught a snootful of my scent. 

Wapato

As I head down the river left side of the cove, a mature Bald Eagle takes off from an overhead tree and crosses the cove.  A single down feather is shed mid air and I watch it for awhile before deciding that it is going to take all afternoon for it to settle to the water.