May 24, 2008

We're back at it!

Started at Harding Appletree Boat Access at 7:50 am. It's downriver from Falls. My husband Bill dropped us off and the plan is for him to pick us up at Union Access just upriver from Shickshinny. At the start the temperature was about 43 degrees and the sky was relatively clear. It was our first time in the kayaks this year. The river is flowing nicely and the trip is 28 miles long. We paddled five miles in the first hour; it was the fastest time we had experienced yet. We had a tailwind probably 75% of the time.

After about two hours the Lackawanna River emptied into the Susquehanna on river left in the Pittston area. We have heard some people refer to the Lackawanna as the dead river. We can understand! The Susquehanna riverbank on the left side was orange—it stained the rocks, fallen trees, anything along the river's edge. This orange went on for miles, for hours. We believe the orange color is from the two rivers infiltrating coal mines. We passed a rusty, old, we think railroad coal car, on river left. It looked like it might mark the spot of the Knox Mine Disaster. In 1959 the Knox Mine extended under the river. A support column of coal was removed and caused the Susquehanna to pour through the weakened “roof”, flooding the mine and killing a number of men. There was a vortex in the middle of the river—vortex meaning an enormous whirlpool of water filling the mine. To stop the flooding, the rail company and the mine company dumped hundreds of rail cars into the vortex in an effort to stop the flooding. The train cars might have slowed the mine flooding down, but that procedure did not stop it. Finally the mine filled totally, causing the closing of many mine operations.

We passed lots of levees from Pittston through Wilkes Barre. There were many bridges we went under that helped us gear our speed. The maps for the upper section of the Susquehanna River are excellent. They are only about a year old, and we got them from David Buck of Endless Mountains Outfitters in Sugar Run which is in Bradford County.

We stopped in Nesbitt Park in Wilkes Barre for lunch. After lunch the scenery was pretty rural. Hills and trees. We saw Canadian geese, a turtle, a mallard duck family, a merganser duck, a couple Great Blue herons, and an immature eagle.

The only exciting water was the Nanticoke Rapids. We were proceeding well until we encountered a string of low waves heading for us. I nosed into the third wave because of poor timing. Water went over the bow of my kayak but it only got to the end of the water skirt. I stayed dry and continued through the rest of the rapids. Sue, on the other hand, wasn't so lucky. When her kayak nosed into a wave, it broke across the bow and across her water skirt, and hit her in the chest. She didn't panic—just continued through the rapids. Her kayak took on about three inches of water from that one wave. She sat in water for the next two hours until we reached an access. Then she used our hand bilge pump and had it emptied in one minute. Why didn't we use the pump right after the rapids? We could have easily emptied the water on the spot. We won't do that again—hopefully.

We arrived at the Union Access at 3:05 pm—wonderful time for those 28 miles. Bill showed up at 3:30 and we headed home. Over the day the temperature rose to about 62 and the day stayed dry and relatively clear.