yesterday was a beautiful paddling day....

[rick stoehrer]

and i spent the entire day around kayaks....

the first half of the day was spent unloading a container of boats in NH for tom/mikco....many boats for many different outfitters but tom did manage to order quite a few for mikco...he has a gorgeous black/black explorer with yellow trim (a shawna/leon "lets go around greenland" special) and then quite a few other beauties hiding out up in maine....for that matter a few gorgeous craft hiding in more southern climes...so really now we be an excellent time to call and see what it is he's got you should buy! (okay, it's a shameless plug, get over it!)

while okay, it wasn't the "fun" part of the day...

greg p from CT came up and picked up his custom explorer (orange/orange/blue - su-weeet looking boat) and we felt obligated to paddle it somewhere worthy of it heritage. and so after a quick bite to eat headed out of newburyport to catch the max ebb at the mouth of the merrimac yesterday afternoon.

we rode the fast moving current down to a series of rocks before the mouth and played in the eddies there - breaking in and out and hopping between them...it was a blast and great beginnerish stuff for handling races and such....we eventually cut out, crossed the narrow channel at the N tip of plum island and let the river wind us out of the mouth.

here was a great playground...all of it closed to us because it's the channel of the river! we felt like kids in a candy store and us without a nickel! big rolling swells colliding with the river....5 feet or so, only a few of them breaking gently as they strode into the channel and up the river.

we played on the edge, out of the channel and caught a few rides on these big soft swells....it was great....both of us catching and riding a few and breaking off before the big stone jetty at the tip....at one point greg went hurtling past, fast as hell. his seeming speed augmented by the fact that the river at that point is carrying me out to sea as he rides a swell in...it was pretty neat.

we only played briefly though as we knew we had a slog back up the river 3 miles back to the put-in....many of the eddies are closed to us at this time of year because of the striper fishermen who seem to believe that they own the first 75 feet off shore anyways....so our paddle back was made a bit more difficult and then to top it off we had a wind coming out of the W....well, at least there's a headwind, right?

so our paddle back was bit like the song of the volga boatmen but in all a great, if hot and sweaty, afternoon.