The Vermont Paddlers Club

Never one to be happy with the weather, all week I had been looking at the forecast and surprisingly, there was a solid 1+ inches of rain forecast for Friday morning.  I say surprisingly because most of VT was in a severe drought and we'd only seen appreciable rainfall once since April.  We had a Green release Saturday which got me thinking... we could have a Missisquoi release on Sunday!

Bob got in touch with Enel and they were on board and even willing to drop to minimum generation to get us enough water.

I showed up around 9:00 and found a decent minimum boatable level already going over the dam.  The dam operator, Travis, showed up a little later and gave us a little extra water.  Enel has a lot of this automated and I think they can do this all remotely, but they always send someone up just to make sure everything is good with us.  Good customer service and we aren't even customers of the normal sort!

There were about 15 of us and per Missisquoi tradition we did laps as a giant group.  The level was on the lower end, but that's fun because you can go for a lot of different moves that might be a little to exciting for higher levels.  I think we did 4 or 5 laps.

As an FYI, this was our first release up there this year (largely due to the drought, which has meant this was the first weekend there was enough water for a release).  Still, we don't nearly use up our allotment of release days in a given year, so if you want a release up here, let us know!