The Vermont Paddlers Club

The ~6 hour ride over to The Forks was half the fun, as usual, with several of us car-pooling, a pair of walkie-talkies to pass the time and keep one of the caravans in sync, and Frank arriving quite late Friday night having gone north of the border and back into ME at Jackman (he has "friends" at all the border crossings). The little one-horse hamlet where the Dead and Kennebec meet truly feels like a place where time stands still, a little (or a lot) like in Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion.

Most of the group had never paddled the Dead before, and none of us had in recent times. Since it is a scheduled dam release, we knew we would have 2400 CFS on Saturday and 1800 CFS on Sunday, medium and med-low, respectively. The weather was warm and mainly dry while on the river both days, but it offered up a steady light rain Saturday night in the campground. Not enough to spoil dinner cooked over Ken's gas grill, or stop several from a short drive and hike to see the lovely Moxie Falls. Karl was in a hammock overnight, which wasn't the best thing under the circumstances, and the young couple on the site beside us cashed it in in the middle of the night - tossing their brand new tent in the trash and bugging out.

Tony, Frank, Tina, and Jamie earned their keep by helping retrieve the shuttle vehicles from the put-in, and Tony got additional brownie points from the group (ask John) for collecting a bunch of dry firewood on the return trip (with no axe or saw), The hornet's nest Tony disturbed getting firewood was nothing compared to the "assault" staged by the campground owner/manager, based primarily on her memories of weekends long ago when the private paddling groups at her campground ruffled the feathers of her "bread and butter" raft-going clientele - who like to drink too much and stay up late lighting off fireworks and being generally obnoxious. But even when she came bustling onto our site accusing us of theft of service and threatening to call the cops if we were secretly harboring a dog and with little sympathy that we might actually value getting a good night's sleep, and even though she came with "back up", Frank and Ken and Karl (in particular) joined forces to keep things from escalating into fisticuffs. It would have gone down differently in a Kesey novel, I'm sure.

Tina went off to Moxie Lake on her own to explore Saturday, but joined us for the run Sunday and paddled with confidence. For Ken the Dead was a good place to practice paddling with less timidity in preparation for the Labor Day weekend on the Ottawa, and Rich was doing the same. Karl had a helmet cam and recorded some video clips that were fun to see afterward (on the www somewhere), and both Jamie and Tony took digital photos (http://bit.ly/xxs25P).

The weekend was a "full adventure" (Ken) with "a very convivial group" (Jamie), and such outings should be repeated from one year to the next. Now that the Kennebec minimum flow in the FPL Energy dam license agreement is up from 140 CFS to 300 CFS, a low water run on the Kennebec on Saturday afternoon will be a possibility during the long days of summer, and/or all day Sunday at 4800.