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Cancelled - Casco Bay, the Hard Way - May 14-17, 2020


Dan Foster

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Cancelled due to stay-at-home directives in New England.

The annual club trip to Jewell Island has been posted for a while on the calendar. This is a call for interest in forming a pod of up to 6 kayak campers to commit to a more circuitous route to our annual gathering, exploring more of Casco Bay by spending Thursday night on a different island before meeting up with the larger group for Friday and Saturday nights on Jewell. This group would focus on visiting a large variety of islands in Casco Bay on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday. We would launch by mid-morning on Thursday, and spend Thursday and Friday exploring, with an expected arrival time on Jewell no earlier than 4PM on Friday, leaving just enough time to set up camp and contribute to the potluck dinner. We would join the main group for Saturday's social paddles and meals, and then plan for another full day of paddling and exploring on Sunday, arriving back at the cars no earlier than 3PM.

The focus of the trip would be on maximizing enjoyment and time on the water, but with plenty of stops and exploration, rather than focusing just on miles. Still, expect 10+ n mi with loaded boats per day. There would be lots of opportunities to practice navigation, and everyone would be expected to participate in navigating and leading the group to the next destination at some point. Since there are six paddlers, and three full days of exploring to do, we'll team up in pairs so that everyone gets experience in planning and leading a day's worth of adventure.

If there is interest, I may run a pre-Jewell planning and navigation workshop for any paddlers who want one (regardless of whether you're going to Jewell or not), possibly at REI that Tuesday night if we can steal the room away from the NSPN board meeting.

This would be a weather-dependent trip. We'd evaluate wind direction and weather in the days leading up to the trip and make launch and camping plans accordingly. If the weather looked sufficiently lousy, we would likely scrap the Thursday plan and just become another Fri-Sun Jewell pod.

To maximize our camping options on the smaller islands, the pod is limited to 6 paddlers. Given time of year and the fickle nature of New England weather during a 4-day trip, paddlers in this pod must own a drysuit and have previously kayak camped with NSPN.

Let me know if you're interested, and we can develop and evolve these plans as the spring progresses.

Cancelled due to stay-at-home directives in New England.

Edited by Dan Foster
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