09/26/99 Sea Kayaking From The Navy Yard:
After visiting friends in New Hampshire for several days I'm now staying with other friends in New Jersey while preparing for minor surgery resulting from the 'man pain' (hernia) I suffered from all summer.
It's been a couple of weeks since I've been on the water. Since we're right near the Delaware River I strapped the kayak onto the truck (which will probably go into the shop about the same time I do) this morning and drove the couple of miles to an easy put in I found a couple of days ago.
The put in is at the end of Red Bank Ave in Woodbury, NJ directly across the river from the old Philadelphia Navy Yard. The Navy Yard was closed a couple of years ago and has since been bought (I think) by some foreign corporation that has contracted to build a couple of ships over the next few years.
The put in was off a parking lot and a couple of feet from the river. I had to lug the kayak over some logs washed up by the tide and onto an almost sand beach. That's quite a change from the rock beaches of northern Maine where I paddled all summer. There wasn't too much garbage at the high tide line but something had crawled up in there and died some time ago. Phew!
It was about mid-tide of what I thought was a flood tide. When I pulled out I could feel a 1-2 knot current pulling at me and since it was flowing from west to east I changed my opinion to an ebb tide and headed into it.
I stopped to admire about 8 warships in dry dock across the river at the Navy Yard. There were two (of what I took to be) battleships and two similar, but smaller ships (destroyers?). There was one that looked to be an air craft carrier but seemed way too short. I think an air craft carrier is close to 1,000 feet and this was only a couple of hundred feet long so I don't know what it really was. There was another even smaller ship with a flat fore deck.
I went to take a couple pictures of the ships but the camera batteries were dead. Three years was a pretty good life span but it still sucked not to have them when needed. Of course when I put new batteries in I did so with a partially exposed roll of film in it. The new batteries set the picture count back to 1 so I just threw the whole roll away.
The Philadelphia International Airport is right down the road from the navy yard and many planes make an east to west approach right up the river and over my head.
I thought I saw the Philadelphia skyline in the distance and headed off into a light wind and a moderate current. As I was paddling up to a small island in the middle of the river, a large tanker passed me with no wake. I looked over that way a minute or two later and saw some moderate swells approaching. After a second look, I saw they were actually standing swells, if there is such a thing. I've seen lots of standing waves before but these were longer, gentler swells that appeared to be moving against the current, presenting a strange sight. The current was also considerably faster near the island and I had to put in a lot more effort to make any forward progress.
As I paddled past the island I realized I was actually heading toward the sea rather than inland towards Philadelphia. The skyline I thought was Philadelphia on the Pennsylvania shore was a refinery on the New Jersey side. The river must have some turns in it so even though I was heading west, I was still heading down river to the ocean and the tide was in fact a flood tide still coming in.
I paddled against the current until 12pm and guess I only paddled about 3 miles or so and had a pretty decent workout. I decided to have lunch on the little island I had passed and turned around to go back and figured maybe 10-15 minutes to get there. It had taken me 30 minutes to go from the island to a refinery with red checked holding tanks near the airport. I wasn't in any hurry and just sat in the middle of the river watching tankers and tugs go by. I was passing the island before I knew it in only about 5 minutes with no strokes at all so that must have been a pretty decent current.
There were a dozen or so Canadian geese on one corner of the island so I landed on a different side on a coarse gravel beach. After eating a sandwich I laid back with a small log under my head and watched airplanes come in over the river for a landing. There were many from all parts of the world. I could only hear them when they were east of me and when they got over head and headed west they seemed silent and I soon dozed off.
When I woke up an hour later, I drifted back to the put in in about 20 minutes. So 3.5 of moderately heavy paddling one way against the current only took about 25-30 minutes of drifting to return.
The tide was all the way in and I had to land right over a bunch of logs 3-4 deep. That was a new experience. I ended up just paddling up onto them as far as I could and then step out into 2.5 of water.
09/28/99 Paddling From The Walt Whitman Bridge:
I got down to the Red Bank Ave. put in around 10am with vague ambitions of paddling up the Delaware River to Philadelphia if the tide was right. It wasn't. It appeared to be low tide with a fair amount of debris just floating around. If it was in fact low tide I wasn't going to try to paddle against an incoming tide on the way back nor was I going to wait 6 hours or so for an ebb tide to bring me back.
It was a 0.5 mile or so paddle over to the Navy Yard where I wanted to get a couple of pictures of the ships in dry dock. I was over there the other day but the camera batteries were dead. Today when I got the camera out I saw I'd forgotten to load film in. Oh well, I'll get the pictures sometime.
The jets were roaring out of Philadelphia International Airport, taking off west to east up the Delaware River whereas the other day they were landing east to west down the river. They were also a lot louder for a lot longer today.
I decided to head up the river towards Philadelphia anyway to get a feel for the distance and potential problems for a future attempt. Passing a large refinery, I watched as a tug boat pushed an empty tanker 10 times its size away from the dock and turned it around downstream. There were also a fair number of barges being pushed by tugs, several tankers and a few cargo ships on the river. The Liberty Belle, a doubledecked, paddlewheeled, white riverboat was out too. Just the way it was manauvering made me think it was out for a practice run.
I had lunch around a green can mid river and watched a large sloop from days gone by being used for some kind of training exercises as it tacked back and forth across the river in light winds. After lunch I paddled past some grain elevators (or something) to the Walt Whitman Bridge. All I could see upriver was more docks and warehouses and a big bend in the river so I turned back, right in to a pretty strong current. I thought it best to get back on the New Jersey side and that took me over 30 minutes to make the 0.75 mile crossing.
I'd been in the boat for a few hours and needed a stretch before attempting the couple of miles still ahead of me. I passed a red nun and saw a white marker up ahead but didn't pay it much mind.
I was paddling at an angle towards shore when out of the corner of my eye I saw a commotion over by the white marker. Looking directly at the marker, 150 feet from shore, I saw the water start boiling and churning as if it was the propeller wash from a large engine, but of course there was no boat around. It only lasted a few seconds and then was gone. What was it? Maybe giant bubbles working their way up from the river bed, maybe some kind of underground exhaust pipe from the nearby refinery. I dunno. In any case, I wasn't going near that white marker again.
As I continued on the return trip, I passed several nice views of the Philadelphia skyline in the distance. There must be some really sharp turns in the river upstream because the views were directly across the river from me and the river must double back because it runs along the east side of Philadelphia.
10/03/99 Paddling From Moore's Beach:It was hotter (low 80's) on this Sunday in early October here in New Jersey than it was during most of the summer in Maine. Monotonous video game noise, dogs barking and women yelling drove me out of the house in search of some peace and quiet.
I thought I'd find a spot closer to the mouth of the Delaware River in western New Jersey with less industrialization but couldn't find anything close by. There are lots of marshlands that make the water inaccessible and when I could get near the water, the areas were pretty bad.
The Delorme New Jersey Atlas didn't show any boat ramps so I kept heading south, poking around on back roads looking for an access point. Driving down route 47 I saw a sign for Moore's Beach and figured where there's beach, there's water and off I go down another back road.
This one soon turned into a dirt road with huge (10+ feet wide/long) potholes filled with water and went on for 0.5 miles through the marshlands. I could only drive 1 mph or ruin the truck and as I'd approach one of these potholes, 10-20 crabs would go scurrying out of the water into the grass or reeds or whatever at the side of the road. The crabs varied in size from a quarter to a silver dollar. With all the water in the potholes it looked like there had been a really heavy rain the night before although we didn't get any 50 miles away.
Eventually the road and potholes gave way to a small, deserted, litter filled beach and the Delaware Bay. This beach is in Delmont, NJ, off route 47, just north of the Dennis Creek Wildlife Management Area. The day was fairly bright with some haze but I still couldn't see across the bay to Delaware, even though I don't think the bay is more than 5-10 miles across. I could see what I took to be Cape May to the east, curving out into the haze.
I thought it was somewhere near low tide and sat down on the beach to have lunch so I could watch the water. A half hour later the water level didn't appear to have changed any so I accepted the dead low tide theory.
Recently in Maine, a guy had driven a brand new Subaru out over a sandbar to an island at dead low tide. When he came back after paddling a few hours, nothing but the top of his car could be seen above the water.
These marshlands are very flat and to make sure I didn't get caught like the other guy, I planned to paddle a couple of miles east, come back to the launch point, check things out and then maybe paddle a couple of miles west and come back.
The shoreline and the water are featureless in this area. Mile after mile of flat marshlands with very little to distinguish one area from another so when I saw a couple of lumps 100 yards off shore I had to go out and investigate. They turned out to be what I would call lobster buoys (having just come from Maine) but in reality were probably crab buoys marking crab pots down below.
A little farther out I saw a stick poking out of the water and some long thing swaying back and forth above the 1 foot swells. When I got out there, I saw it was in fact a long stick and the other thing appeared to be a long piece of black PVC pipe with a red and green band painted on it. What was it for? I dunno. But such was the excitement of the trip out.
I reached the only distinguishing feature of the area, a point, in about an hour and 15 minutes and turned around to head back. The only other thing I had seen on the way out was what I took to be a crab man (is that the right term? I have the image of a huge crab with a man's head attached to the body.) tending to his traps.
As I began to retrace my steps (strokes?) I noticed clumps of grass now surrounded by water and could also hear the waves as they hit the shore. I started thinking about those potholes filled with water and the surrounding flatlands. What if that wasn't rain water in the potholes? What if it was tidal water? What if the entire area became submerged as the tide came in? Uh oh!
I picked up the pace somewhat and as I paddled I could see how the tide was making inroads into the marshes. A channel appeared here, a small pond there. The farther I went, the larger the ponds became and they soon started looking like small lakes. Sh*t!
I wasn't really worried about the truck being submerged. I had seen the high water mark and the sand near where I was parked was not at all packed. I was getting concerned, however, about the tide filling in the marshland behind where I was parked, covering the road and cutting me off.
I passed a couple of markers I recognized, the flapping PVC pipe, a point made of discarded cement and macadam blocks. When I passed a small beach with a couple of piles sticking up out of the sand I got the GPS out to see how far I had to go yet.
It read .10 miles and as I watched it changed to .11 miles. What? I paddled a little farther and sure enough it flipped over to .12 miles. I had passed my launch site. At that moment I considered the $250 spent on the GPS unit a couple of years ago well spent. This was definitely not the time to be paddling back and forth along a strange beach looking for my launch site (the truck and road were back in among the reeds and couldn't be seen from the water).
I went back and quickly found the snake trail I had made in the sand as I dragged the kayak across the beach to the water's edge. I didn't waste anytime getting the kayak secured to the rooftop racks and the gear stowed. I was also helped along by little noseeums chewing away on me. Nasty little buggers with a big bite. I didn't know they were this far south.
As I slowly threaded my way through the potholes on the way out, I kept glancing around, expecting to be swamped at any minute by the incoming tide. I did in fact pass a fair sized pond right at the edge of the road. I suspect it was there all along, however, and just I didn't see it on the way in.
I saw what had to be an eagle of some sort soaring around over the flats looking for dinner and a little farther on, another one. There were also a couple of smaller hawk like critter in search of a meal. I wonder what they were all looking for? Crabs?
It was getting on to about 3:30pm and I decided to just continue driving south towards Cape May. Every time I came to a promising looking road, I turned in to investigate and found several more unmarked put ins. Unfortunately, there appeared to be no variation to the coastline, no islands, no nothing. If I'm really in need of a paddle fix, I might come to this part of the Delaware Bay again, otherwise...