adambolonsky

If anyone plans on going, give me a call. I'm offline by 2:30 Friday and can't access the site or email. Adam @ (781) 643-9966

The forecast for tomorrow looks good: windy, warm. Let's go out and crash around. If others promise to show up, I will, too. Show and Go, outer Boston Harbor, Saturday, November 22. Put-in at 9:00 am City Point, South Boston. We'll head up the main channel to land on either Outer Brewster or Green Island, two of the outer harbor's more remote islands. High bluff on Brewster, views all the way to Gloucester. On Green, the remnants of a burned-down casino and a large wreck. If the winds are over 15, we'll kick around in the chop sure to build. Recommended are drysuits, hot food, warm clothes in a dry bag, spare paddle, tow-belt, and level 3+ skills in addition to a neoporene hood and gloves. Post interest here. Count on being back at the put-in by 4:00 pm.

I don't know if others are as tired as I am of seeing my name on the message board lately, but anyway, and for clarity's sake: An NSPN member recently created an account on this board using my name, then used a post, under my name, to make a few non-kayaking related points. I was to say the least p-o'd by the member's doing this, and contacted the member, who then apologized and defused the situation effectively. I point the above out primarily because the views this member expressed under my name were NOT my views, were not generated by me, in fact were not mine in any way, shape, or form. So for what it's worth: all that's been posted on the board this last week under my name has been mine excepting the post which lead to a long thread about all sorts of things I usually don't talk about, and which anyone who knows me would have realized couldn't have been generated by me.

We could use a co-presenter on Sunday to discuss some of the roughwater skills Ken Cooper mentioned in his recent post. I for one was so astonished to see Ken pull what I call a "shtoonk", which is essentially jamming the paddle blade-down forward of the cockpit when about to be broached bow-to a breaking wave. It was thrilling to see how his kayak swung bow-to the break, a fine defensive position, and one I want to learn to use. I've never liked being beam-to in shore break, even while fishing, and was glad to see Ken use that move two weeks ago. So can Ken or someone else come along to talk about some of the moves they've learned in rough water recently? No need to present yourself as the know-all, but some added perspectives can help. I can talk about moves I call "the gimp", "the tuck", and "the butter-up", but that's about it, as anyone who's paddled with me knows I hate wallowing around in shorebreak in rock gardens.

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The Rough Water chalk talk will be held from 4:00 pm to around 7:30 or so Sunday, November 23, at Dee Hall's workplace in Burlington so that those who are attending Brian Nystrom's outfitting workshop in Waltham can join us (a fifteen minute drive). Bring $5 or so to buy pizza or put a posse together to take Suzanne Pritchett hostage and have her cook for us. Directions to the classroom are: Take route 3A North (off Route 128 in Burlington). Take a right onto Corporate Drive after less than 1/4 mile (at traffic lights across from Audi dealership.) Follow Corporate Drive to end at cul-de-sac with three office buildings. Park in lot on right. Walk to #25 and call (781)229-7812x200 to be let in. If you would, please post your interest here or send me an email so we can plan on how many photocopies of the teaching materials to make and how many participants to expect. Class description below. Thanks, Adam adambolonsky@yahoo.com Join NSPN at a chalk talk 11/23 (Sunday) at Dee Hall's offices in Burlington from 4:00 pm to roughly 7:30 pm as we discuss how to plan for and execute a roughwater trip, including rescues. We'll be drawing heavily on the lessons NSPN paddlers have learned from the past two on-water roughwater worksops. The class will be fast-paced, varied, and informative, and will include group work, decision-making exercises, and the sharing of the knowledge and experiences of paddlers who have hit the rough water hard recently and been hit equally hard by it in return. Topics to be covered include: 1. The differing challenges posed by wind-driven wave and offshore swell, and why one type of rough water can be more challenging to deal with than the other. 2. The most effective rescues to use and which to avoid in roughwater and higher winds (believe me, we have many ideas on this now, given what went down after two capsizes last weekend that put six paddlers on the rocks in less than ten minutes). 3. The importance of setting clear and specific rescue protocols with your group before leaving the put-in. 4. How to assure the safety of a group while a rescue is in process 5. How to execute two-rescuer rescues (i.e., victim, primary rescuer, and secondary rescuer using an upwind rope); how to execute three-rescuer rescues (i.e., victim, primary rescuer, secondary rescuer, and third rescuer, or "bulldog") 6. How to read coastlines "live", and charts beforehand, to anticipate where roughwater will occur relative to the current marine forecast. 7. How to make put-in and paddling direction decisions 8. How to keep warm while in the boat and while on breaks. 9. Radio shorthand to use to make rough water communications faster and clearer. We'll also hear from several paddlers who capsized hard these past two weekends...

Join NSPN at a chalk talk 11/22 (Sunday) at a location TBA from 4:00 pm to 8:00 pm as we discuss how to plan for and execute a roughwater trip, including rescues. We'll be drawing heavily on the lessons NSPN paddlers have learned from the past two on-water roughwater worksops. The class will be fast-paced, varied, and informative, and will include group work, decision-making exercises, and the sharing of the knowledge and experiences of paddlers who have hit the rough water hard recently and been hit equally hard by it in return. Topics to be covered include: 1. The differing challenges posed by wind-driven wave and offshore swell, and why one type of rough water can be more challenging to deal with than the other. 2. The most effective rescues to use and which to avoid in roughwater and higher winds (believe me, we have many ideas on this now, given what went down after two capsizes last weekend that put SIX paddlers on the rocks in less than ten minutes). 3. The importance of setting clear and specific rescue protocols with your group before leaving the put-in. 4. How to assure the safety of a group while a rescue is in process 5. How to execute two-rescuer rescues (i.e., victim, primary rescuer, and secondary rescuer using an upwind rope); how to execute three-rescuer rescues (i.e., victim, primary rescuer, secondary rescuer, and third rescuer, or "bulldog") 6. How to read coastlines "live", and charts beforehand, to anticipate where roughwater will occur relative to the current marine forecast. 7. How to make put-in and paddling direction decisions 8. How to keep warm while in the boat and while on breaks. 9. Radio shorthand to use to make rough water communications faster and clearer. We'll also hear from several paddlers who capsized hard these past two weekends... Post your interest here and watch the message board for an update on the exact location. Chances are we'll do take-out pizza or whatever.

Join the usual gang of knuckleheads at Cocktail Cove on Great Misery Island the day after Thanksgiving (Friday) at 11:00 for the 327th annual Bob Burnett "I ain't dead yet, I'm only living out West" Memorial Day-After Thanksgiving Paddle. Last year we had a few challenging rescues, charcoal briquets (not the least bit legal), high winds, raw weather, and good leftovers, the year before a rescue that probably saved two paddlers' lives. Traditionally this has been a non-waivers show-and-go with groups leaving from Manchester Harbor, Riverhead Beach in Marblehead, and sometimes Greasy Pole, Gloucester. I'll be at the Manchester Police Station put-in at 10:00 am. DRYSUITS ABSOLUTELY RECCOMMENDED, YOU'D BE NUTS TO PADDLE WITHOUT ONE this time of year. Also, northwsterlies can blow like stink this time of year, so conditions could range from low level three to all-out double red-flag gale forces (check any coast guard flagpole for corresponding signal-flags posted). Bring leftovers to share and watch for subsequent postings from other paddlers planning to leave for Misery from more challenging distances. I'll be taking the baby route as usual this year (at least distance-wise), but keep in mind that even the short route from Manchester to Misery can present its own version of hell when the weather blows in....

Overnight near Cuttyhunk It was one of those two-nighters you throw together on a whim: clean the campstove, toss the drybags into the car, pick up some canned goods and fill a couple of gallon jugs with drinking water before ducking down into the basement to retrieve the headlamps and the VHF. It was that time of year when Buzzards Bay is prone to fog, and I wanted the VHF in case we had to make a securite' call to avoid getting run down by a powerboat or merchant vessel during our crossing. Our compass course, 170 degrees magnetic from Horseneck Point, Westport, Ma. to Cuttyhunk, the last island in the Elizabeth Island chain off Woods Hole, would take us within two miles of the Buzzards Bay entrance tower and directly across the shipping lane that runs past the Elizabeths before sliding into the mouth of the Cape Cod Canal. Sure, my cousin Paul, who was paddling with me, had spent two years in the merchant marine fifteen years ago, but that was no reason for us to get run down by one of his former shipmates captaining a New York-bound tug, oiler, or LNG tanker during our passage. The crossing we planned ran from Westport to the light off Cuttyhunk's Sow and Pigs reef, and would take us across six miles of open water. It would only prove us hapless bumblers, "damned sea kayakers", were a container ship or tug run us over. I'd had a mug of coffee aboard a tug in Boston Harbor about a month back ("crank", those guys call their coffee), and felt my ears burn in embarrassment when the second mate, hitching up his pants, informed me ---"present company excepted, of course" --- that any self-respecting merchant mariner regarded a kayaks as god-damned yuppie-toy nuisances (which sometimes they are), navigational hazards, or worse. We planned on sleeping out on Cuttyhunk on a friend's land. We had one-man tents. One advantage of paddling to Cuttyhunk in late-October, of course, is the chance to land on an island otherwise overrun with summer visitors. And property rights tend to loosen when there's no one around to care whether you've spent the night in their field or on their lawn, useful to consider, as we weren't exactly sure where our friend’s land was. Besides, and because I'm not much of a planner, I wasn't exactly sure either where we'd sleep the night before in Westport. We'd slip into the woods with our tents somewhere, I told Paul, shove off in the morning from the ramp by the Route 88 bridge. We’d thus avoid the need for a crack of dawn departure from Arlington. "Westport's got plenty of undeveloped land", I told Paul. "We'll find a place to sleep there". I owed Paul one anyhow. Back when we were in high school, he bought a pickup truck which he raced, over hills and through forests, and with me in it, against friends from surrounding towns. In the wasteland of wire cuts that run from the Pilgrim nuclear power plant in Plymouth to towns west, we flipped the truck on a rock berm and received matching cuts on our chins in return. Paul's take on the crash, over the years, has been that the experience bonded us, even if it was me who emerged from the crash also with a separated wrist, a broken arm and foot, and twenty stitches to his six. So we loaded the kayaks onto my station wagon and headed down Route 95 towards Westport. We ate supper in a local chop house on the Westport River, unrolled our charts during dessert, and dissected the bearings and distances we’d cover during the crossing. We paid our bill, parked the car at the ramp, and set out with our tents in search of an empty house lot near the beach to sleep in, which we found, and did. Paul was in town for a few days from Colorado. Since he introduced me to sea kayaking ten years back, I figured the least I could do was show him how we seakayakers in Massachusetts seek out adventure. The NOAA forecast called for two days of fair weather, big swell, low winds. We agreed the crossing would be a no-brainer. Cuttyhunk is one of those remote, beautiful Massachusetts islands kayakers land on only if they know someone who lives there, have the money to spend a night in the island's pricey inn, or make the island a ludicrously long day-trip's resting spot during an expedition up one side of the Elizabeth Island chain and down the other --- a truly sick puppy paddle of 28 miles-plus sick even if one rides the tides on both legs of the trip. Otherwise Cuttyhunk is a quick if pounding motor trip east, etc., across choppy Buzzards Bay from such southeastern Massachusetts coastal towns as Dartmouth, New Bedford, Falmouth, Woods Hole, Mattapoiset, Marion. And even then most visitors leave Cuttyhunk at dusk to spend the night at anchor in Tarpaulin Cove at Pasque Island four miles distant. Once primarily a private anglers preserve, Cuttyhunk has since become a colony of summer cottages. The island is small. It's barely a mile long and half as wide. Visitors can summit its single hill, scan the horizon for Marthas Vineyard and then in vain for Nantucket, then simply content him- or herself with counting the number of yachtsmen walking the dirt road from the tiny general store to the dock. There, many September afternoons, freshly-caught yellowfin and bluefin tuna, shaped so uncannily like footballs, can be seen lying inert in ice chests. But you're talking high-season excitement here. Late October is different. There's really no one out there. The fields of grass are windswept. The sandspit at the island's east end nearly connects Cuttyhunk to Nashawena across the Canapitsit Channel. Walking there, you can watch the Forbes family's herd of water buffalo, standing around at water's edge unattended, chewing cuds and cooling off, shaking their wet, scraggly beards like ruminating prophets. The livestock are a tax dodge. Sticking farm animals here and there on these twelve largely uninhabited islands, the Forbeses receive significant farmland-use tax reductions. The crossing takes about four hours, including a layover at the Wildcat hulk on Old Cock Ledge, where we talk to a couple of sport fishermen hunkered down on the wreck with their gear. The Wildcat is the rusted remains of a cement barge that ran aground on the ledge in a gale three decades back. When the barge broke up, its cargo of cement seeped from the hold like flour leaking from the biggest flour sack in the universe. The cement cemented the barge to the ledge. It has lain there ever since, rusting down over the years to an enormous, partially-collapsed dock-like platform whose sides and bottom the seas have punched in. You can paddle into the middle of the hulk, land on it, climb on it, fish from it, dive into its hold from its decks --- all without getting killed. The hull's bow and stern sections overhang the ledge like matching garages whose roofs the wind have ripped up. We land at the hulk to swim and cool off. The fishermen lying around the decks look pretty well done in, like the sun has gotten to them. They are sunburned, and I wonder how long they've been out here. Apparently long enough: they have a striped bass the size of a goat hanging from a rope tied to the wreck's rusted anchor stanchion. They have also set up a little encampment on the hulk's lower deck, where it looks like they burned about half a cord of firewood. "You guys sleep here?" I ask. "Yup," one says. He is trying to stab a piece of bait onto a hook he's sharpened with a whetstone he takes from his hatband. "What, you serious?" "Yup. See our cots?" Their battered aluminum outboard skiff, tied off in the hold at the hulk's transom, has two cots folded up inside it. Of this I make a mental note. Who was it said Washburne Island in Waquoit Bay, a couple of Boston Harbor islands, and Rockport's Thachers Island are the only places a sea kayaker can legally sleep offshore in Massachusetts? We shove off. We land at Cuttyhunk’s town dock a couple hours later. There’s no one there. The cottages are mostly boarded up. We take a look at the chart. We’d found my friend’s land, but it was too hilly and rocky to pitch the tents. Other places looked too sloped and thick with brush or difficult to get to from landing spots. The state territorial sea line extending from Mishuam Point on the mainland to the northern edge of Quicks Hole, where Quicks cuts into Pasque Island, has us in state waters by at least six miles, meaning we are still in state police jurisdiction and could be harassed here if someone sees us. We get back in the kayaks and paddle west to Penikese Island, where someone once told me there is a remote remedial school for boys. We can't raise the school on VHF, so we land, find a path, follow a boardwalk. We break through some thick brush and come upon two boys tossing a football around in a field by a laundry line blown nearly horizontal in the rising wind and snapping with heavy linen. So much for NOAA's forecast for mild evening breezes. A big, burly man with a beard appears on the front porch of the building on the bluff and tells us to come on up to the main house for dinner. He is the school director, he tells us, and after dinner informs us that there is no way we can sleep here. In fact, the last time kayakers were on-island was years ago, when James Taylor held a fundraiser here for the school with a couple dozen friends. They ate lobsters and steamers. We are welcome to pitch our tents, however, at the extreme east end of the island, on state wildlife refuge land, but only so long as we never expect to be able to do it again. The school needs its remote distance from the mainland, he tells us, to protect and nurture its students, many of whom have been abused by their families, were threats to their neighborhoods, and have been given a second chance by the state's juvenile penal system. The school's therapeutic model includes the exclusion of visitors. After us, only birders with infrequently-granted permission from the state's department of environmental management will set foot on the refuge at the end of the island again. It is near dusk. If we try paddling to Nashawena, he says, the island’s caretaker will only find us and kick us off, regardless of how far dusk has fallen or what the weather is. Paul and I paddle where we are directed. We pitch our tents. The bird-droppings in the grass are thick as dust in a wood shop. The next morning, we paddle the six-mile crossing back to the put-in. The hulk's overnight anglers have left. Wetsuit paddling season is approaching its end. On land, only our car awaits us; the crossing back is as uneventful as the trip out has been. When I get home, I do a web search. Those who want to can spend the night on Cuttyhunk through legitimate ends by booking a night in any number of the island’s bed-and-breakfasts. They're closed after Columbus Day, however. This has been more than a few days after that, though, and thankfully so at that. If I hadn't taken my cousin on an improvised adventure, he would have called me a wimp, or, worse, a boy scout paddler who only does things by the book. ##

Thanks for the info on tide stations, Buddy. I checked my Nantucket Sound charts. Ebbs do flow WEST in the sound, as you pointed out; this would have made Jagoda's and Aranof's initial drift (if it was indeed a drift) all the worse towards the southwest, where I guess the heavier incoming tidal currents, flowing east after the tide change, would have then pulled them out towards Monomoy Point, with the backing NW wind Don mentions helping. This is all speculation, of course. What's probably more important is what one of us would expect and try to use to ded reckon were we to get caught in the fog or at night and more under the influence of tidal or wind drift. With a drastically diminished capacity to figure out by visual features where the hell we are, it might be tough too to maintain the peace of mind to factor in wave troughs, etc. Yeah, yeah, yeah, bring a GPS, but for a daytrip who wants to? Cumbersome, distracting, and always ready to crap out due to battery depletion. Currents run fairly hard in areas of Salem Sound, I noticed this weekend. Aside from the spinning rip that wraps around the southeastern edge of Bakers Island, where Marc Schlosser caught a big striper last year, there's also a current that looks like it runs south/southeast and north/northwest in what's known as Stinkpot Alley in the Salem Sound approach channel. One gets pulled toward Whale Ledge by it on the outgoing tide (?), towards Childrens Island (?) when the tide's on its way in...

I know that when the CG conducts SAR operations for lost boaters they use drift models based on wind direction, windspeed, and tidal current velocity and direction. Thus, were one of us to go missing in the fog or at night, the CG would want to know at what time we were last seen, and where. Calculating forward from that time, they'd factor in the wind speed and direction to assume how far, and in what direction we've drifted after a capsize or an accident. They'd then factor in the tidal speed and direction to arrive at an assumption of where we are. A kayak drifts faster than a body, of course, so I assume they'd factor that in also: whether they looking for a body, a kayak, or both. So when Mary Jagoda and Sara Aranof drowned two weeks ago in Nantucket Sound, SAR had this to contend with: a noreast wind, thus offshore, blowing from Harwich southwest towards the middle of Nantucket Sound. The time, late afternoon, meant the tide was still going out. In the Sound, ebb tides flow east (?), towards Monomoy Island. It was a also few days after a big moon, so the tide's velocity was increased. I'd assume then that Jagoda and Aranof were first blown southwest by the wind, then were pulled east, and fast, by the tide towards Monomoy's Handkerchief and Stone Horse Shoals, two truly horrifying places to be if the rip is up due to bigger tides. The water is rough, with standing waves and boomers. The Shoals then spill off into the Pollock Rip and Channel --- deeper water where the current increases in speed when it wraps around south Monomoy Point. This is the approximate area where Jagoda's body was found, so too the kayaks after the 750 square mile, 51-hour search. So the drift vectors were: southwest, into Nantucket Sound, where the fast tidal velocity then picked up the boats or bodies and began to pull them east. Anybody else have a different analysis? I bring this up for a couple reasons. There are hard currents that run in both Sandy Bay off Rockport and off and around Milk Island and Land's End, where a lot of NSPN stuff goes on. The currents run basically northwest and southeast, depending on the tidal ebb or flow. The flow is especially pronounced in the Avery Ledge area, between Straitsmouth Island and the Breakwater, so too in the open passage area northeast of Straitsmouth to Thathcers, Londoner Pole, and beyond. Perhaps it's important we as a club discuss and are perhaps able to list or document the tidal direction for other popular NSPN areas. . In the event one of us goes misising in fog or at dusk, it'd be helpful, I think, if we as well as the CG and local harbormasters have a notion of where we or our boats or getting dragged by two alternatingly conflicting or mashalling vectors: that of the wind, that of the current. If nothing else, knowing this will help us try to assume by ded reckoning where are should we find ourselves in Jagoda's or Aronof's terrifying situation because, sure, we may call oursevles "seakayakers", but that assumes an awful lot.