St. Mark's River, Fort to Lighthouse

After hemming and hawing a little about where to go for the Geezer's second day we settled on putting in at the San Marcos de Apalache Historic State Park (the fort) down in the little town of St. Mark's. In addition to the little museum they run there's a public boat ramp and a nice grassy spot which makes for a great kayak launch. I had heard, again from Georgia at The Wilderness Way, that from there you could go about 4 miles downriver to a spoil island that made for a great lunch spot, and then either head back up or carry on towards the wildlife refuge, depending on conditions and your inclinations.

We were on the water around 10:30, slightly before low tide, so we had the last of the outgoing to carry us down. Warm temps and almost no breeze. We found the little island, and it really is a nice spot for a snack, or to overnight (it's designated as a camp site on the FL circumnavigation trail). We decided to go ahead and make the run for the lighthouse to eat lunch. By this point the sea breeze kicked up pretty good, and so that last mile or so was pretty arduous. The corner of the Refuge that you naturally end up at (on the Lighthouse Pool trail) has a fine little sandy beach for pulling onto, and a covered picnic table for lunching, which we took advantage of. After lunch we wandered around the lighthouse a little before heading back upriver. For the trip back up the tide was coming in, and more importantly, the wind was to our back. It chopped the water up pretty good. There are a bunch of oyster bars that are only a few feet wide, but are arranged in long arcs across the river, which can be a hassle for a kayaker, and a nightmare for a motorboat/sailboat, especially at night when you can't see them.

Birds: common loons, American coot, common moorhen, boat-tailed grackle, great egret, great blue heron, snowy egret, laughing gulls and several other gulls and terns, brown pelican, American white pelican (a first sighting for me), cormorant, ring necked duck, and others I'm sure but that's all I can recall right now.

I took a few pictures, but they'll have to wait until tomorrow because I'm tired and full and ready to fall asleep again. Geezer takes off tomorrow and I'm off, so I could paddle, but I don't think I will. A day of relaxing might be pretty nice. Cheers.

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Venerable St. Mark's Light, begun in 1829, moved to present location in 1842.

Marsh

I paddled with some of my old SMKC folks today in a super high tide and increasing wind. It was Aimee and I, Colin and Barb, Geezer, Brooke, and a friend of hers. We launched at Jasmine and fought the current S down Bank's Channel to Shinn's and then flowed thru Hidden Creek to the old dredge spoil, where we stopped for a break. We walked all the way to the other side and enjoyed the elevated view. Geezer showed us a fox den he'd come across and we found a couple of sand dollars. It was blazing hot on there. Back on the water and to the takeout. On the water a little over two hours. Then we all cleaned up and went to Incredible Pizza for their killer $5.99 lunch special (a personal pizza, salad, and drink). It was gooooood. Now we're packing for our upcoming move, which is kind of sad, but exciting to go somewhere new too. Cheers

Handsome Fellers...

Look at 'em. Me with Geezer (still sporting his SMKC gear) and Sharkbait at my Bon Voyage party this past Sunday evening. There's almost 50 years of SE NC paddling experience in this photo. Those boys are two of my favorite people, on and off the water.

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Geezer's response when he saw this photo was "How come I'm the only one that looks half in the bag?"

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I reckon I look a bit loose myself.

Pound Cake II

Tonight we had fish tacos with Mr. Geezer and his lovely and charming lady. The fish was cod, breaded in panko and topped with a cabbage/cilantro/lime juice/zest mixture, fresh tomatoes, cheese, and secret cream cheese sauce on corn or flour tortillas with side of black beans and queso fresco. For desert we served the pound cake again, toasted as before, with vanilla ice cream, but this time with crushed raspberries. Once again, it was friggin' delicious. Man, what would life be like without good friends and good food? I don't want to know.

Find some people whose company you enjoy and share some good food and drink with them.

Cheers.

A Bright Shining Lie

Today is the day that I will finish the 792 page Pulitzer Prize winning book by Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, which endeavours to explain the American involvement and subsequent failure in SE Asia through the vehicle of John Paul Vann, first a military advisor and then pacification director who spent a decade in country until he was ultimately killed at the end of our involvement in a helicopter crash (wow, that's one hell of a sentence). It's been very good, and very informative, but I'm excited to move on to something else now, as I feel like I've been reading this book for a long time. I'm off to work now, but there's only 19 pages left, so I've got a date with the end this evening. Cheers.

Geezer's Exercise Loop

Today I paddled with the Geezer again. We did his fitness loop, which begins at Wynn Plaza at WB and heads N up Lee's Cut to the ICW to Shinn's and back up Bank's Channel, with the option of going out Masonboro Inlet, which we took. We took a short break at the swimming hole to refuel, put a skirt on, and practice a re-entry or two. Then we fought the current out (incoming mid-tide). At the end of the jetties I decided that it was rough enough for me there without heading out, so I waved Mike on and he did the trip around the sea buoy while I screwed around in the chop at the mouth of the inlet. The wind was pretty stiff from the S, and there's a few feet of swell in the water (boding well for my early morning surf sesh tomorrow), so it was pretty rockin' out there. Mike told me after that he wouldn't have gone out in a decked boat either (he paddled a surf ski). We didn't see any remarkable wildlife (pelicans, terns, gulls, oystercatchers, and great egrets all made appearances), but it was a good trip due to company and the challenging conditions. Paddling twice in as many days; that's pretty good. If I get some quality waves in the morning I'm going to call this week very successful. About 8 miles in ~ 3 hours? Cheers.

Night Mission on the Cape Fear

On a recent evening walk along the riverfront near our house I observed how lovely and smooth the water looked at the end of the day once the wind calmed and the air cooled off. I thought it would be great to do some sunset paddling, especially since the put-in is so close to where I live. I mentioned it to the Geezer and he said that he'd been wanting to do that for a long time and had just never gotten around to it. So we hatched a plan to look for the right night, and last night worked.

I got off work at 6, rode my bike home, and loaded my gear on the car for the 6 block drive to the launch (I know, driving 6 blocks is a little ridiculous, but it's too much to carry that far solo and I don't have a paddle cart). We were on the water a little after 7. Tide was about two hours into falling and the breeze was light out of the S. We paddled against the current about 3 miles up river to an old rice marsh and explored that a bit. The tide was ripping out of there, so the paddle out of the marsh was fun because we were really hauling ass. The grass in there is really high, almost double the height of cordgrass at the beach. At one point there was a loud noise, like something crashing through the marsh right next to us. I thought that a gator would come flying out at me at any second, but it ended up being birds lifting out of the grass. It's amazing how much noise little creatures can make (ever thought there was a bear running through the woods only to discover it was just a squirrel?). As we got out of the marsh and back into the river for the return trip, the last light was just disappearing, and we were soon in complete dark. It was really nice and the lights twinkled and the air was cool. There was almost no boat traffic. When we got back towards town we paddled along the edge of the riverwalk. Wilmington is a pretty town from the water. It was funny to watch people react to us. Due to current we were moving pretty fast, so to them it must have seemed like these two people in boats just appeared from nowhere, silently gliding by, and then disappeared back into gloom.

We got off the water around 9:30. We covered around 8 miles. It was a really good time and I'm looking forward to doing it again soon.

Alligator Creek

Aimee, Pete Brown, Mike and I paddled Alligator Creek today in search of the waterway's namesake. I was so stoked about seeing that one on Thursday that I wanted to see some more and Mike knew where to look. We weren't disappointed. The weather was beautiful, maybe even a little hot. When we launched from Belville Park there was no wind and the Brunswick River looked like glass. We weren't 10 minutes up the creek when a medium sized gator slid off the bank ahead of me and cruised out into the water, eyeing us for a minute before submerging. We continued on under the roadway and into the "lake" in the middle of the island, where we split up to search different banks. Aimee and I were the lucky ones, spotting a really big guy pulled up onto the bank up to his hind legs just a split second before he spun around and went under. I think he was even bigger than the one I saw on Thursday. He looked long and fat and prehistoric. At the other end of the lake there is a small creek that dumps into the Cape Fear just north of town. You can only get through on a full tide, which we had, so we wound our way through there at a very cautious pace. I found a dead turtle. We poked into the horseshoe and up creek off it, then lunched on a small bit of high ground on Eagle's Island. Then up to the N end of Alligator Creek and back through, where we ran into several more gators and a couple of osprey in the nest. We also saw an anhinga, unusual here, and tons of red-winged blackbirds. The trip back across the Brunswick River was a little breezy, but no big deal. Pretty day on the water again. Now to cleaning and bill paying. Cheers.

Mill Creek, Varnamtown

My good friend Lydia, host of the party I attended last weekend, is starting a new job this spring down at Holden Beach renting various beach gear like surfboards, bikes, and kayaks and running tours by bike and kayak. She's doing some reconnaissance for tours, so today Mike and I drove down to help her explore a possible tour location in the area. We launched from a boat ramp in Varnamtown, which I had never heard of until today and paddled across the Lockwood's Folly River into a marsh creek called Mill Creek. There was absolutely no wind when we were launching, and I was being eaten alive by no-see-ums. There was also a haze of smoke from the fires that are burning down in Myrtle Beach, and the air smelled of smoke. The bugs let up a little when we hit the water, but shortly a little breeze picked up and that was the end of the bug problem. At first I was kind of non-plussed on the paddle, but figured it couldn't go wrong since Mike and Lydia are two of my favorite people. Shortly though, it got interesting as we stroked up the creek against the outgoing tide as the creek meandered through a large marsh. Mike gave us a lecture, at Lydia's prompting, about the plant life. The standard local marsh grass is spartina alternaflora, which is very familiar from our days guiding at SMKC in WB (also known as marsh cordgrass). As we moved further into the marsh, however, the species changed to black needle rush. I've seen this on Bradley Creek at WB. It's interesting to see the change from all cordgrass to a border zone of both grasses to all needle rush. There were plenty of marsh periwinkle's along the way. The highlight of the paddle, by far, was having my first alligator experience by kayak, and it was a doozy. Mike and Lydia stopped for a quick restroom break and to scout a lunch spot, which wasn't very good. From his standing vantage, Mike suggested that there might be a better spot a little further along, so I decided to paddle ahead and check it. I got about 50 yards up when I saw a mud bank where all of the grass was flattened down, as though a gator had been sunning there. I was aware of the possibility of seeing gators from convo with Mike, so I noted it but kept paddling. All of a sudden I was aware of fast movement ahead of me, and when I looked, there was a HUGE alligator in mid-air, lauching from the bank into the water. He didn't slide in; he jumped. All 8-10 feet of him sailed through the air and splashed loudly down into the muddy creek, just 20' off my bow. It happened so fast that I'm not positive of his length, except that he looked very long. What I am positive of is that he was very big, and that his girth was more impressive than his length. There is no way I could have wrapped my arms around his middle. I was thrilled and shocked and scared, all at the same time. It was amazing. I paddled backwards because I didn't want to test or follow him by myself. I kept going, in reverse, as fast as I could, all the way back to Mike and Lydia and started excitedly yelling at them what I had just seen. We paddled further along until the marsh became forest and the water looked more like blackwater than marsh creek, both to try to find the gator and for a better lunch spot. We found neither, and ended up eating in our boats just across from the gator launch pad. The entire way back, and still some 7 hours later, I glowed about how awesome it was. In the bird category we saw great blue heron, great egret, spotted sandpiper, red-breasted merganser, green heron, laughing gull, common tern, red-tailed hawk, osprey, and wood duck. On the way back I started feeling the effects of forgetting sunscreen and wearing short sleeves, which I remedied by rubbing the cool black marsh mud onto my forearms, which worked quite well. It was a nice trip. I can't tell on Google Earth how far into the forest we got, but I'd estimate the trip at 8 or 9 miles total, out and back. On the way home I got a Nehi grape soda in a glass bottle. It was a good day. Get your ass outside and do something fun! Cheers.

NE Cape Fear, Croomsbridge to Whitestocking

Aimee and I went on a CFPA trip today on the NE Cape Fear, from Croomsbridge Rd. to Sawpit Landing on Whitestocking Rd. There were about 15 people along, including Geezer and Marie, Virginia H., Rezac, Pete Brown, and a crew that I didn't know. It was more people than I usually like to paddle with, but once everyone got launched it spread out nicely. Aimee and I lagged behind everyone else by 50 yards or so most of the trip. The weather was coolish, but sunny and nice. There was a moderate breeze, but it didn't really matter because we were sitting down pretty low between the banks. Along the way we saw an old abandoned school bus that reminded me of Chris McCandless' Magic Bus in the Alaskan wilderness (see Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer). We saw a couple of hawks that I'll have to dig through the book to figure out (I think red-shouldered), turkey vulture, tufted titmouse, cardinals, and heard several woodpeckers, though never saw any. It's quaint country, with one side of the river peppered with domiciles that ranged from the very basic to the reasonably ostentatious. I'm a fan of the little rustic places. There were lots of nice folks out on their porches and docks enjoying the day and most of them quizzed us on where we came from and where we were heading. I'm not sure that they see a lot of kayakers on the water, especially groups of that size, judging by their questions. It was an interesting group that ranged from the extremely experienced to one poor guy who had his paddle backwards and upside-down and was slouching like he was in an easy chair watching a football game. It's a pleasure to watch Rezac maneuver his boat. I've never seen anyone edge and turn so proficiently. We were under three hours on the water, covering almost 9 miles. It seemed like a really short trip, but it was a nice one.

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Magic Bus

South River

Aimee and I ran section 9 of the South River with friends today. We couldn't have asked for nicer weather in mid-December, with highs in the lower 60's. There was a little wind, but you'd never know it on the water because of the protection afforded by the forest and banks. This is the same section that we did for the BFE 1 last February, though the water level was roughly double this time, which sped things up and reduced our time on the water to roughly 4 hours including a 30 minute lunch stop. Soup in a thermos, btw, makes an excellent lunch on cool winter paddles. The put-in (on NC Hwy. 41 near 210) was much better than it was in Feb. (due to the higher river level) and the take out (Ennis Bridge Rd Wildlife Ramp) was excellent; shuttle minor. There were a couple of little strainers, but we never had to portage. We saw a young deer swim across after we flushed him out of a canebrake and I saw my first white-breasted nuthatch. There were occasional turkey vultures perched in trees, waiting for a kayaker to go keel up I guess, and red-bellied woodpeckers darting around, but little visible wildlife otherwise. I'm sure we scared plenty off, but that's to be expected with a group of ten. I'd like to do some of these blackwater (it's actually rusty red from the tannin in the leaves, but super-clear) trip with a smaller group for better nature watching. I'd kill to see a bear out there sometime. Still, it was nice to paddle with familiar folks as well as meet a few new people. Thanks to the Geezer for setting this up. The man is an encyclopedia of local knowledge and an adept at picking proper trips for given tide/conditions.