June 10, 2008

June 10, 2008

We were on the water by 8:45 from the access in Lemoyne. It was already oppressively hot and humid. The water seemed that it had no current. We passed the Harrisburg Intl. Airport which has its only runway parallel to the river. We enjoyed watching planes landing and taking off. It was a pretty busy airport.

We stayed river right, around a large island, mainly because the maps showed that there were bathrooms after a short amount of riffs. WELL, the river was low and the “riffs” were two inches of water going around boulders—almost impassable in places. The kayaks took a beating, but kept on ticking. The Pungo's have been great, rugged, open cockpit kayaks. They have hit rocks—well, we have hit rocks with them—and they have scraped many rocks, either rather pointed or slab type, and they are still fine.

The stretch of river before the York Haven Dam was very slow and very hot. The sweat just poured out of us. We drank lots of fluids.

York haven Dam is interesting in that it runs diagonally across the river. The paddling area gets narrower and narrower as the dam comes over to river right. There was a portage sign. We put dollies on the kayaks and pulled them along a path first, and then through a picnic grove, across a parking lot, and down a thick gravel hill to a point where a tiny stream enters the river below the dam. Back on the trip again.

Next was five miles of flat gummy water that took a while to get through.

The river had gotten so wide that it was difficult to find landmarks from the map. As we were approaching the area before the Shock's Mill Bridge, we saw a buoy laying over flat in the water. We wondered what it meant but didn't think much about it. As we got closer to the bridge, as noted on the map, there were riffs. It got very difficult. There were shelves that were hard to read and as a result sometimes we didn't go over at the point that was least abrasive to the bottoms of the kayaks. We felt that some of these shelves could really be called short waterfalls. Along with them were the large and small rocks showing above the water and the other rocks lurking just below the surface. It was a challenging stretch. After getting through all that, Sue realized that the buoy was probably telling us that the water was low enough to make the riffs unnavigable.

After the Shock's Mill Bridge area we went through another five miles of still water with occasional shelves and rocks. It's amazing that the water is flat and shiny and there's nothing around and all of a sudden the kayak bounces over a rock! I guess that's why we don't see much motor boating on the river.

The sky was getting overcast with dark patches. We went river right through about a mile and a half of rapids that were around and under the Wrights Ferry Bridge and the Columbia Wrightsville Bridge. As we went through, Sue thought she saw lightning and heard thunder. I didn't see the lightning and thought the noise was truck traffic on the bridge. Originally we had our mind set on getting to the Upper or Lower Lock 2 Boat Ramp at mile 38. But we decided to get off the river immediately because of the weather change. We didn't want to get stuck out on the water with lightning. So we got off at the Wrightsville Access at mile 43.

There was very little wildlife today, but there were lots of dead fish.