Adam Bolonsky

Hi Fred, bring whatever gear you have. It's tough to say whether a wetsuit would be sufficient. A bunch of us swam off Duxbury Beach this past Saturday and the water was like toast. But once we got out of the water and into the air: chill time, and I ended up with my own classic pre-hypo response: intense drowsiness and so I took a big ol' nap out at Gurnet Lighthouse out of the wind, in the sun. So bring your wetsuit. If nothing else, you will find out whether the idea of getting into the water with just a wetsuit in late November seems intimidating or not. And I'd assume that if you were to dump during the on-water excursion, someone will be around to fish you out. But no guarantees there, which essentially closes the loop: we're responsible for ourselves, this is not an official club event, and everything we do on-water or in is a matter of personal choice. But at a minimum, if you plan to get into the water bring a neoprene hood, neoprene gloves, booties. Also there will be lots of drysuits there to look at. So come along!

Deb, plenty of room. See you there.....

Mark: WOW! DAMN! Wish I was there. DAMN! Isn't that awesome, two break-offs by two big fish. Tip: if one fish breaks off, peel off ten feet of line from the reel, cut it, and re-tie the new or old lure. Chances are that a fish which breaks off also stretches and abrades the line below the lure, making another break off (and lost lure) a near-inevitablity. Damn, damn! I wish I was there. Sounds like a classic Dux day. And I thought the place was toasted after getting so skunked there so thoroughly last week. Maybe I'll do Sunday there with you if you can convince your buddy. Otherwise it's the Cape for me on Sunday if the wind holds off.

Anyone who's done it will tell you that paddling in winter can be a fabulous experience. So..... We'll meet at the NSPN clubhouse at Liz Neumeier's in Lanesville on Saturday, 11/20 to first see and discuss how coldwater paddlers dress for a day on the water in winter, then get into the water at Lanes Cove to test gear. AGENDA: 1. (Indoors) An NSPN member will show and discuss how to dress for a day on the water in winter (drysuits, undergarments, gloves, boots, hood, etc.) 2. (Indoors) A second NSPN member will give a presentation on what's contained in and how to create an immersion kit which gets deployed when a paddler dumps in coldwater and needs rewarming on an island or on shore. 3. (Indoors) A third NSPN member will give a talk on hypothermia protocols which are a lot more involved than simply stuffing someone into a car with the heater on. After that we leave the indoor meeting place to head to protected waters to test gear: gaskets and seals and drysuits and how well they hold up under immersion. Then those who want to can take their first coldwater trip, which will be unofficial yet "lead" by some of NSPN's cold water paddlers. After that we head back to the indoor meeting place for warm food and soup. If you plan to attend, EXPRESS YOUR INTEREST HERE. And let's hope those enrolled in NSPN's culinary arts programs pitch in with chili or soup or whatever! NOTE: This day on-water and -in is not designed to be as intensive nor as experiential as NSPN's last year, with its full exposure to cold water and mild hypothermia symptoms. Rather, this is meant as a low-key day for paddlers who are interested in winter paddling to test and look at winter gear in controlled conditions, to ask questions, and to get a look and feel for winter water in a controlled setting. LOCATION: Lanesville, MA (Gloucester) and Lanes Cove (also Gloucester). We'll meet at Liz's at 10:00 a.m., be in-water by around 12:00, and should be eating hot food by 3:00 or so.

About five years ago Jim Brayden hosted a whole crew of us at the Bass Haven Yacht club in Beverly in the middle of winter, where we tested dry suits and paddled in an ambient temp. of 18F and on a saltwater river that was mostly frozen. Buddy Hogan lasted twenty minutes floating in his drysuit in a big puddle he broke through in the ice, Brian Nystrom tried to roll out of the ice, Liz Neumeier shot some priceless video, and we all retired afterwards to the clubhouse for hot soup. The whole thing was written about by Bill Kirk for a feature article for Offshore magazine, complete with a full-color photo spread. (Anybody have a copy of that? Lost mine in a move.) Anyways, does anyone have access to a heated building with access to kayakable waters for a coldwater workshop and gear test in late November? My idea is for two or three presenters to do a talk and dog-and-pony show on how some local winter paddlers dress for winter paddling and full immersion, someone to talk about hypothermia protocols, then for those who want to to hop into the water to test gaskets, seals, drysuits, etc., and see what it feels like to float in winter water. Then we could go out for a quick spin. Freshwater access is probably best, as local lakes and ponds tend to get cold earlier in the year than the ocean, giving us a chance to more closely duplicate what happens on the ocean December through April. Post your ability to host here and I'll get the wheels rolling.

First thing Dave Hasselhoff and I did after we landed was put his fish on ice and thoroughly rinse our legs with vinegar, big slapping handfuls of it, from a plastic jug I keep in the car. For most, large swaths of Duxbury Bay’s mud- and sand-flats require a vinegar rinse-down post-trip. Then we unzipped our radios from their drybags, packed the cars, and left for Boston. This was the boat ramp at Kingston’s Jones River. We drove through Tinkertown, past Halls Corner, then past west Duxbury’s cranberry bogs before the highway ramped in and we could head north. Curse of this place is, sightfishing a moot point, is its mud parasites. They thrive there and at low tide you can't help but kick them up. We’d spent several hours walking the shallow flats looking for fish, towing our kayaks behind us on bow painters tied around our hips, and our footsteps had stirred up the mud, silting the water around our knees and shins with parasite-ridden water. You can't see the parasites: they're microscopic. The stirring action never fails to release the parasites from the mud and send them into suspension. So: say you have your legs in the water here. The microscopic parasites slough from the water and onto your skin: onto your ankles, calves, shins. You can’t see the things. They’re dynaflagellites with drills. They bore into your --- the flats-walker’s --- skin. There they set up shop, forming an excellent and most efficient little histamine-activating operation. Twenty-four hours later you break out in a bumpy skin infection: tiny welts the size of pencil tips which itch, ooze, and harden. The acidity of the vinegar kills the parasites before they have time to drill in. God knows: as mudflat creatures they are well-equipped to survive long periods of time out of water when the tide is down. The only thing that kills them on-skin is vinegar. I keep a jug of it in the car. The alternative is to abrade a couple layers of skin off by scraping the parasites down with salt on your palm, but that method tends to open up the possibility of other, more serious infections. Next best is cream antibiotic, prescripted. But both solutions are after-the-fact paste-ons that work only after you've begun to suffer. Some people are not allergic. Obviously I’m not one who isn't. So not everyone has to to rinse off with vinegar Windsurfing this bay ten years back I had to stand in the shallows of a mudflat for an hour in order to repari a broken piece of equipment, a snapped downhaul or something, maybe a broken ladder lock in my waist harness. The mud swirled underfoot. The parasites occluded the water. They latched in on me and drilled in. I didn't feel anything. Two days later I had to visit my doc for what seemed my lower legs having been sandblasted with a mump virus. My shins and calves are still scarred: hundreds of white flecks, destroyed pigment. “Come on.You’re kidding,” Hasselhoff said when I handed him the jug of vinegar and told him what to do with it. “Nope, I aint.,” I said. “Slap it on. Thick. Even if you’re not allergic to them you’ll smell better.” His booties were thick with stinky muck. So was his hair. “Leave it on til tomorrow a.m. The acid has to stay on a while to work.” “Uh-huh,” he said. "And snake venom should be sucked out by mouth." “Look, it's one of the definite hazards of foot-fishing these flats if you're not wearing a wetsuit.....” “What the hell do they call this infection?” “Clammers itch, which is wrong, because that's caused by some byproduct of a parasite in migratory bird sh**, which this stuff isn’t.” “What’s the genus?” “What?” “Its zoological classification ---- ” Hasselhoff is a good guy, an ardent fisherman, an awesome kayaker, but he is also very much a nerd. “Windsurfer who taught me the vinegar trick called them mud bugs.” “Scientific. Give me that jug.” I gave it back to him and he went back to work, really slapping on that vinegar with big, broad splashes. Hasselhoff is also a fussbudget. You should see how clean he keeps his car and gear. “Come on,Hasselhoff. It’s supposed to be a rinse, not a bath.” He slapped it on even thicker. “ ---- For what I paid for your services?" He slapped it on again. Hasselhoff had landed twenty stripers. Strapped across his foredeck lay a keeper about the size of a small Buick. In his aft hatch lay three gutted and bled bluefish, which I had had to unhook for him. “Right,” I said. “And then you woke up last time you caught a keeper that big.” Hasselhoff had caught the keeper, a 36-incher, in about five feet of water two feet off my stern, casting a shad at a mushroom swirl in the water which bloomed, or rather exploded, in the water after a tail slap so loud I thought Hasselhoff had capsized his boat and begun to wet exit. A guide wants his payers to land big keeper fish, but still I was jealous. I’ve been fishing Duxbury’s flats since I was a kid, and never have I landed a keeper there that big. Anyhow. We’d been on the flats with the kayaks since 5:00 a.m. The fall run was on (still is) and the surface-feeding fish were everywhere. We waded the guzzles and channels and creeks on foot, towing the boats behind us. When the schools surged forward up into the flats, we followed them. They folded up into thick bubbling layers the heavy sheets of menhaden and sand eels they had cornered, trapping them in the drained embayments. There had been baitspray. Lots of it. We’d caught a lot of fish. The muddy embayments which form in the bay’s flats’ depressions when the tide drops are, to me, the South Shore’s most absorbing fishery and thrilling fishing spots. Yet they are the one area most seakayakers are unaware of when they dismiss Duxbury as just another dull and lame tidewater beginners area. Dull and lame: far from it. We fished the flats of the lower Jones River at Kingston, Captains Flat off Standish, the tidal streams of Cordage’s weed beds. When the tide dropped to full ebb we entered the Cow Yard where it drops off into the deepwater channels at the Bug, the mid-channel lighthouse which marks Plymouth and Duxbury harbors’ entrances. The tide was in constant movement and crawling with fish. The fishing had been good: about ten separate schools of stripers under 28”; a half dozen schools of snapper bluefish, then a ferocious, hammering school of offshore bluefish, with heads as big as half-gallon milk cartons, that tore through past Splitting Knife channel, jumped into the air, and disappeared. This school knocked down our shad rigs, broke off our steel leaders, destroyed two of my $9 surface plugs. All told then, Dave landed twenty stripers, shorts, then the keeper and the three bluefish; I caught ten shorts and lost four bluefish. Not a bad day, this. The water was warm: upwards of 66 F. And with the sun lower in the western sky than it is mid-summer, the bay had glittered like a swath of diamonds when we paddled west. “Thanks for the day, guy,” Hasselhoff said. “I had fun. Too bad I got the biggest fish.” He gave me back my jug, folded himself back into his van, and drove off. I had his cash in my wallet, so it all balanced. If there is any emotion other than thrill to be had when catching so many fish in shallow water, for me it’s this: when the striped bass feed here with their delicate and then anxious assiduousness, and in these shallow weedbeds, they are at a point rendered helpless, and you can feel shame, if that counts as an emotion. The weeds hampers the fishe's ability to swim; they get lost in the drainages, the weedbeds; they become frantic; they become disoriented. And when their protective schooling formations finally scatter and their schools disperse, the fish become both vulnerable and defenseless. Hasselhoff had taken a keeper that was of the sort, due to its mass, that is by nature a loner, the one giant in the forest ignoring the gremlins, so there wasn’t much emotion to be had there but the smugger's, the top-dogger’s. But the schools of smaller fish. They nose in and out of the oddly slick texture of this weed-thickened water, rolling over when the water depth becomes single inches. Then they become addled with confusion: the sand and mud swirls around them and the bottom scrapes at their caudal fins. They cannot thrash, they cannot turn on that heart-stopping aggressiveness which splits deep water in to pieces. Likewise their prey cannot jet into the air. The scene lacks the violence which otherwise justifies hooks. The weeds and the eel-grass are traps. You think of live flies stuck in amber, of animals that have fallen in quicksand. You feel a sort of morbid compassion, a queasy sense of shamefulness. What Dave and I saw at the end of the day then, and especially east of Clarks Island, and so too in the throat of the Jones River, was desperation. The stripers continued to try to feed in the eel grass. They were feeding in anticipation of their long trip back to the mid-Atlantic before the New England kill-off, come mid-December, which they would not be able to overwinter. They cut soupy wakes into the water’s surface. They got stuck, as if in syrup. Dave and I didn’t talk much. Fishing would have seemed vicious. I have fished lots of loose water both solo and with others, also on commercial striped bass trips off Gloucester where we landed half a ton of 40"-plus inch fish in a single trip. Yet it is only here, in these weed and grass flats, that have I ever felt my excitement or my exhaustion over hooking dozens of fish give way to a feeling of trespass. In the bay’s eel grass behind Clarks Island and in the throat of the Jones River is where I usually mouth my canned little preamble to clammers itch and mud mites and vinegar, if only to keep the hooks sheathed in the foam blocks on the foredeck. Whether I distract depends upon whether I feel prepared to witness such helplessness without a sense of feeling that we don’t belong there. Sometimes it’s embarrassing, with other anglers, to witness what is an essential nakedness. On the weed and the grass flats, you see most clearly how vulnerable a feeding fish is. You see too how overmatched a fish is when it's stalked in shallow waters by a kayak angler whose instincts cann turn no less base, focused, remorseless, and quick, and do so in an instant. Or so the moral equation suggests when you take the time so suss it.##

Late, of Lanesville (Gloucester) Massachusetts, Frank the cat Neumeier, known variously to family, friends, and guests as Frankenfurter, Frankenfus, the Frankenator or simply His Frankness; at 15, of an encounter with coyotes, recently of Gloucester and even more so, lately. Frank was a good cat, a life-long bachelor, and though fond of mousing on occasion, was built less for speed than comfort. He was gray, with small, triangular ears, and could move quickly. Mainstay and notable presence these past five years at post-paddle get-togethers at Liz Neumeier’s house in the seaside town of Gloucester, where typically he paraded amongst guests, rubbed the occasional leg, and never mooched unless there was fish, Frank was tolerant of his owner’s guests’ intrusions into the private baths he maintained on the house’s first and second floors, even when those guests were dressed in neoprene or other remarkably stinky, overpriced fashion statements of their allegiance to the saltwater environment which is anathema to cats. Frank never tired of showing off his private entrance (i.e. cat door) on the first-floor stair, both of which (cat door and stair and, on occasion, entire house, including foundation) he claimed to own and to have built by himself one weekend a couple years back, a complete fiction of course, but a story which, as bragadoccio, was endearing to hear, as Frank was at all times and in all other respects a most friendly and good-natured cat prone to occasional exaggerations, usually about how hungry he was. Frank was best fed by the inexperienced with alacrity and quickness (“get that hand out of my bowl now, mister”). His daily ration was one table- spoon of wet food, a small plate of dry. If you didn’t get out of his way in time, he would knock the bowl out of your hand, trundle himself under foot, snake around somewhat and then send you, flying, into either the utility sink, out the back door, or smack into the fridge. If your antics did not elicit indifference it could elicit a meow of “Serves you right!” and a guffaw, best translated as “Mrowfffff!” or “Mree-owwww!!” Not one to suffer fools gladly, nor interlopers or houseguests who had the audacity to “bed-hog” his sleeping areas on the lower and higher beds of the first-floor bedroom, and elsewhere, and in fact all over the house, including the couches and all of the chairs, and most of the rugs, and sometimes even smack right there in the middle of the floor where you were trying to walk in the dark, Frank was nevertheless a gentleman, which is notable for a cat. He would knock politely on the guest-room door as a sort of warning before barging in wholesale, jumping up onto the bed, and then clambering all over you before beating a rapid tattoo into your limbs and chest with his paws. Yet he never failed to keep his claws retracted, and thus was known as a gentleman possessive of sleeping areas, even if he snored loud enough to make your teeth chatter. Rain-cloud grey in color, grey, indeed, as the Cape Ann dusk, Frank loved the outdoors so long as the sky was clear, the barometric pressure in the upper ends of the milibar, the moon in the third quarter, no chance of rain, temps between 32 and 82.5 F, and something worth stalking out on the back deck. Not one to stand on ceremony much, Frank was friend to anyone who fed him, who petted him in just the right spot and in just the right manner, or who wielded the fur-brush by the fireplace with the correct pattern of stroke, pause, double-stroke, pause, and then quitt before he gave one a warning growl and showed you “the claw”, just to remind you who was boss. Man-about-town to the end, Frank passed two Saturday nights past while on deep-cover maneuvers in the thickets near Liz’s. There, as any self-respecting cat would, he was out checking the perimeter and prowling around lest other any other cat trespass or Andrew Binks, Natalia Berg, Marc Schlosser, or any other past houseguest or house-sitter, the writer included, walk off with any of the things he considered his, Liz’s kayaks notably excepted, as he had always been skeptical of kayaks, even if Liz did once try to convince him that a cockpit was a comfortable place to nap, a gambit he rightfully interpreted as a ruse designed to turn him into a kayaker, which he would have none of, thank you very much, as he was “A cat, not a seal, Ma’am”. Frank loathed water, but could have swum if the mood struck him. (Never did.) While Frank may have been unimpressed by kayaks, even those made of Kevlar or those designed to win races and used but once or twice a year, and though he tolerated dogs only somewhat, and certainly had his doubts about NSPN, it being a water-focused organization rife with dog-owners, Frank did like and enjoy Liz’s guests, and for sure he loved Liz. He will certainly be missed by anyone who had the pleasure of meeting him, especially those who loved him, and especially by Liz, who loved and knew him best. May this good cat find in his heaven a plump feather bed, plumper mice, and the occasional stash of top-shelf catnip. Requiescat in pace, good Frank, good cat. Fifteen is a good number of years for a cat to live, yet far too few for so singular and tolerant a clubhouse character.