1/1/11 - New Year’s Day on the Brandywine
In the 6 years that the Penn Kayakers have held the NYD paddle, this is the first year that I’ve had my own personal chauffer. Usually I have to endure standing at the put-in for well over an hour while everyone else shuttles cars to the take-out. Generally it’s absolutely freezing because there is no shelter or windbreak. It’s also fairly boring to stand around with not much to think about except how badly you are freezing and what’s taking them so long.
This year, Kathy is up from Florida for a short visit and she’s borrowing my car while she’s here. A condition of her borrowing my van was that she had to take me to the NYD paddle and pick me up at the end. I’m thinking this should be an annual requirement. What luxury!
We arrived at about the same time the shuttle was returning. From race training, it takes me approximately 6 minutes to unload a boat, get it into the water, and be in it ready to go. It takes most other people (this was a non-racer group) a lot longer than that to get ready and get in the water. Water levels were very low this year, I did not see the need to attach leashes, paddle floats, pumps, VHF radios, flares, tow lines, and a whole lot of other stuff like that to my boat, given that if I went over I could stand up and walk to shore less than 15’ away.
Everyone has their own personal assessment of risk, and although water temperatures were ice cold (literally: the shores were lined with ice, very thick at times, and we paddled among some large ice floes) and the high air temperature for the day was 41 degrees, I knew I was properly dressed for cold water immersion (having tested my gear extensively both voluntarily and involuntarily over the years). I assessed the risk to be low that I’d need anything if a mishap occurred. Civilization was close at hand (a short walk) at all times en route and you can’t get lost on the one-directional narrow Brandywine. As Steve Miller says, “If you see really, really big ships, you know you’ve gone too far” referring to the fact that if you somehow manage to miss the take out you end up in the Delaware River.
Gibson’s Covered Bridge is at the start, and it’s on the National Register of Historic Places. Constructed in 1872, Gibson’s Bridge was restored in 2003. The workers carefully used only the techniques and tools available when the bridge was first built in 1872.
Water was low, and we scraped along for quite a while. Once in a while I had to get out and walk, having ground out on the bottom. This gave me an opportunity to try to raise the river levels by checking out the river banks and returning the 24 ounces of coffee that I drank on the way to the paddle back to the earth from whence it came.
When water levels are low, it’s easy to see things at the bottom of the creek. Sadly, I saw way too many empty beer cans. We saw some big beautiful bass and I wished for a fishing pole. Sam told us about finding a waterproof camera on another paddle, and the camera still works. I personally never find anything valuable, like packs of $100 bills, gold bullion, or even waterproof cameras. On this trip I found a remote control for an RCA TV. I didn’t find the TV though. Later, Steve found a camera, but alas it was not waterproof. But at least we got several pieces of what would otherwise be trash out of the river.
The paddle is about 17 miles long. About half way through we have a traditional spot where we stop (there were 14 of us), have lunch, and enjoy the fact that guys in open canoes can easily carry things like portable bars. I had carefully prepared a wonderful thermos full of hot coffee with half and half for this annual occasion of adding our choice of Baileys or Irish whiskey to our coffees, but alas, this year I left my thermos in the van at the put-in. Sometimes it pays to be a little slower at the put-in, then you remember to bring all the stuff you’re supposed to bring, D’oh!
Kevin, my hero, had made two thermoses of coffee for just the contingency that one of us wayward paddlers would forget our own. I drank a lot of coffee, mostly because Kevin had been quite generous with the Baileys and I kept trying to add coffee so as to not get such a strong shot of Baileys all at once.
You have to have the complete picture. The east and west branches of the Brandywine join here. The west branch was completely frozen over solid. The east branch that we were on had large ice floes we’d just paddled through. The sun had gone under clouds and the temperature was dropping fast from the prior high of 41. We were wet and muddy from scrambling up a mud embankment to get to a flat spot on which to have lunch. Hot coffee with Baileys is a real treat in these conditions!
But with the good has to come the bad, and true to form, Vince sang a sea shanty again this year, using the empty bottle of Jamison’s as a prop. “What do you do with a drunken sailor” was the choice of song and it was suitably horrible yet entertaining, as is traditional.
We noticed one other canoe, not in our group of properly dressed, trained and educated paddlers, getting on the water. It was frightful, not in the “oh God please save me from one more song from Vince” sense of the word, but frightful in the true sense of the word. Remember, I just described large ice floes on the water, shores thick with ice, and a high air temperature of 41 degrees, quickly getting colder. Two people get into this canoe and face each other with their paddles. Since that logistical set up makes a canoe virtually impossible to paddle in a forward motion in any direction, that gives you an idea of their experience level as well as the number of working brain cells they collectively possessed. After some time they figured out that perhaps facing in the same direction would help, and then proceeded down the creek. In jeans and cotton sweat shirts. With no PFDs. These kinds of people make me angry because they make it harder for the rest of us when they invariably end up removing themselves from the gene pool.
And speaking of removing ourselves from the gene pool, our next obstacles were the two dams at Brandywine Picnic Park. We could not access one of them, given that the dam pond was completely frozen solid and still had snow on top of it. This is the route I usually take, because you can get out on a dock, portage around the dam on flat ground, and put back in in a calm eddy beyond the dam. Unfortunately I had to go to Option B this year, because there was no possibility of getting to that portage with a half mile of ice backed up between me and the dam.
Option B was the breached dam, which I normally avoid like the plague. I’ve gone through that dam once, and once was enough to creep me out sufficiently that I didn’t want to ever do it again. We all started assessing options. Several of the whitewater canoe and kayak guys and girls on this trip knew what they were doing and were competent to paddle down a breached dam. I watched them and kept thinking that there was no way I was going to make it. Several guys got caught up on bushes, trees, rocks, and the embankments surrounding the dam. I did not like these options.
I set out to paddle across the dam, carefully avoiding getting sucked into and over the breaches in the current. I scouted several spots looking over the face of the dam, trying to determine if I could climb down the face of it and drag my boat over with me. I found one spot I liked.
I pulled over and looked down the face of the crumbling dam. It looked to me like I could get out here, carefully climb down the rocks, shove my boat down in front of me (the logic on that being that if the boat were in front of me, it would crash into the rocks below in front of me instead of on top of me), and get back in once I was down there. I knew it was stupid and dangerous, but in my personal assessment of risk, it seemed less dangerous than careening into the rather large and highly pointy boulders at the end of the breeched chute.
Carefully I got out of my boat. I stepped gingerly on each rock, testing for security. So far so good and I climbed slowly down over the face of the dam. Once I got to where my eyeballs were looking at the bow of my boat above me, I grabbed the bow and pulled hard, hoping to pull my boat over and slide it down beside and in front of me. Nearly losing my balance, I reconsidered the dynamics of this option, rearranged my footing, and tried again. This time my boat slid down easily and my biggest concern became catching the stern.
Once the boat was down in front of me, I continued gingerly testing each rock before I put my weight on it. Most were solid, but I was glad I tested each one as a few slid from under me. As I was getting back in my boat, I saw Steve Miller coming out from the chute. He was soaking wet, although I have to note, since he pointed it out, that he didn’t get his hat wet. He got tangled in some branches and trees, and while “stepping out of his boat” to untangle himself, took a swim.
Every year at least one person, sometimes many, swim on this paddle. The one who swims first gets to be president of our swim club. There is no benefit to this position, but conversely no duties to uphold either. Being swim club president just means that we get to bust your chops for the rest of the year that you were the first to swim in the New Year. “All hail President Steve,” I yelled out to everyone for the rest of the day.
Another place where I don’t like the breached dam is at the Brandywine River Museum. I like to portage that one too. Unfortunately the ice on the banks was way too thick. It was not possible to pull over and portage so I had no choice but to run the rapids through the breach there. This year, because of the low water levels, this breach turned out to be a non-event. It still has whitewater in there, and it’s on a curve with some rocks you definitely have to pay respect to, but because the water was low, it wasn’t as bad as previous years and I made it through with nary a cussword to show for it. After this, the water flattens out and moves slower, so we could leisurely paddle and talk for the rest of the way.
The highlight of the day was seeing seven deer in the water. They were crossing as we came around a corner, and they all looked up and froze for a moment as we surprised each other. They were large and healthy looking. All I could think of was dinner. Mmmmmm . . . grilled venison! They started jogging at first, in the knee deep water, and then took off running up the river embankments. It was quite a beautiful sight to see so many of them together and in the water.
The only fox we saw was a red one, and it was flat dead along the river bank, and of the three Great Blue herons we saw, one of those was dead along the river banks too. The Bald Eagle was very much alive and hunting when we saw him.
Smith’s Bridge is a red covered bridge, just over the border in Delaware. It’s very pretty and comes into view as you round a corner steeped with cliffs and trees. A car stopped in the middle of the bridge, it’s driver staring at us as we paddled under.
Smith Bridge was built in 1839. It was set on fire the night before Halloween in 1961 and completely burned. The new Smith Bridge was rebuilt in the spirit of the original covered bridge. It cost 1.2 million dollars. If you think about it, because the bridge was kept true to its original history, we now have what has to be one of very few one-lane covered bridges that will ever be built in modern times.
Ah, back to the benefits of having a personal chauffer – a very warm comfortable car ready for you at the take out. And the plus side of forgetting your thermos full of hot coffee for the paddle is that it’s still hot and in the van when you get to the end. Delicious!
It was a good day.
Kevin's Photos are here
Look for me in the small red kayak, wing paddle, and you can’t miss my hazmat neon yellow jacket with the red PFD.