JohnHuth

I did a circumnavigation of Georgetown Island last weekend with Dan Carr - Fiddler's Reach, down the Kennebec, up the Sheepscot, through Lower and Upper Hell Gate - great trip. Rather than repeat it, here a link with the route, and the report: http://artofwayfinding.blogspot.com/2013/08/through-gates-of-hell.html

Nice photos! This year was my second trip around those parts. Definitely a fog-prone area, but wonderful to explore, isn't it?

I was in an orienteering race in May, and, boy were these people on top of their game. I'd kind of plod along, taking compass readings...people would go whizzing by me. As it was, I made the mistake of using a military style lensatic compass that is a pain to get orientations off a map. The racers who were doing well didn't use a compass at all - they just were using features on a map. At the end of the day, the winner came in at about 40 minutes, I was 200 minutes.

Thanks for all the stories. I tried an exercise - I went to google images and typed in the phrase "Your GPS is wrong" and there were a fairly large number of signs carrying this. Evidently it's pretty common. In orienteering, there is a phrase, "bending the map" where people try to make observations align to what they think they should be seeing with what's on their map. This seems like one additional step. There's a sense where "this doesn't seem right" kicks in with a map, but perhaps the seeming definitiveness of the GPS instructions leads people to drop their intuition. (?)

So, first off...this isn't an anti-GPS rant, and I will immediately cede to Leon that GPS devices can be incredibly helpful and powerful gadgets. I've been forced into a bit of a corner by my new book, and I'm getting people asking me about GPS failures. There's one case where some college students spoofed a GPS of a guy on a yacht (with his permission I might add). I had one where my receiver failed. I'm pretty sure we'd all agree that a backup, at least, is a wise idea, or perhaps using the GPS itself as a backup, is wise. But, I'm getting a lot of questions about issues with GPS'es, and I was wondering if you folks had any personal stories about problems with them.

I went on a trip in downeast Maine - a big loop in the Grand Lake Stream area, with three canoes and I paddled a kayak. The upper reaches of the Machias River can get pretty shallow, so I didn't want to risk the gel coat on my sea kayak. I used a plastic two-person recreational , moved the seats around, stuck my backpack in, and threw a plastic tarp over it. It worked well. I don't mind really all the scraping on rocks in this particular boat - takes a licking and comes up ticking (or whatever that Timex commercial is) - just not very fast, nor does it do well in big seas, but for this trip, it was ideal. I found a nice portage yoke (I think Old Town makes them) which made portaging relatively easy (including a 1.5 mile portage). I thought that portaging the kayak with this yoke and portaging the canoes were roughly the same in degree of difficulty - but the yoke was absolutely critical to this. It worked reasonably well - I outpaced the kids in the canoes, but these were 14-16 year old boy scouts, so it's not clear that they were up there in the skill level. Anyway, it was a very successful trip, and I was pretty happy with how it worked out. I also know a guy who did a mixed trip (kayak and canoe) in Labrador down one of the rivers up there, and he had much the same setup as I did with a plastic rec model and also reported that it worked well.

It does seem a bit like semantics in this day and age. When I was younger, I paddled for a month across part of Northern Quebec - no human contact or resupply for a month (ask me what I think of bannock). That *might* qualify as an expedition, but I'm not even sure of that one. I tend to think of expeditions as something that's done for the first time - a long hike into a remote location, and scaling an unclimbed peak would qualify as an expedition. Getting dropped off by a freighter on a remote Pacific atoll and trying to voyage using indigenous methods would qualify. But, having said that, I'm more than happy to take an extended camping trip in an agreeable area, like downeast Maine, especially if there are no other parties about.

There is the question of whether you can anticipate a thunderstorm by looking at cloud formations. It's not always possible, but I've spotted proto-thunderstorms in the distance and hot-footed it to a safe island to hole up.

Congratulations - always nice to pass a certification! Cool

http://rendezvous.nols.edu/files/Curriculum/research_projects/Risk%20Management%20Reports/NOLS%20Backcountry%20Lightning%20Safety%20Guidelines.pdf

Just in case anyone is interested - it is finally available as a kindle - took the publishers awhile. Other random tidbits - I'll be giving a talk on this at the MITA 25th in Portland on Aug. 31st. I'll probably spend some time on the tradition of wave piloting in the Marshall islands (a curious subject). I meandered around the Pacific NW on a couple of book gigs, saw Deception Pass, but it was pretty slow moving. I think the Cobscook Reversing Falls have irretrievably tainted me on reversing falls.

Trying not to read Nate's answers, here. Also - I'm using the NOAA online viewer - makes it easy to change scales. 1.) Floods south, strongest current an hour after local low tide. Rationale: there is a large embayment to the north, which will fill up first, as there is more flow into it. 2.) Floods west, strongest current two hours after local low tide. Same rationale - large embayment to the east fills first. 3.) Floods into the pond - need to know something about the connection, however, to say anything about when - it looks solid on the map.

Funny thing, I was pondering precisely this question and I have to say that I cannot. It depends on the bodies of water that are connected by the channel, the depth of the channel, the profile of the channel and the tidal range. This is one of the reasons that I more or less toss out the "rule of 12ths" when I'm looking at currents in a narrow channel. Typically (and this doesn't mean always by a longshot), I find that the currents are higher at lower water levels because there is less of a cross sectional area for the water to flow through, and as the channel fills up, the current speed diminishes. But this example is for a channel that has a depth that is roughly on order of the tidal range. So, try to look at the tides on either side of the channel, and then look at the bathymetry and then try to make a guess about when the speed will be the greatest.

I haven't used a GPS for some time, so I don't know the features on the etrex 20. There *should* be a map that accompanies the display, and there are multiple displays available. For example, you can get a bearing display, an elapsed time/speed/etc display. In had/have and etrex vista, which is fairly old, but even with the rudimentary maps, got some fairly reliable data. The biggest issue is that the exposure to salt water degraded the receiver. Typically, I would punch in waypoints ahead of time - points of land, or landing spots. I then would link them together in a path. There's a display that will tell you your heading to a waypoint - distance to waypoint, speed - that kind of thing. When I was using one, I liked to use this feature - but it required that a pre-program in the route I was using. I tried a side-by-side comparison of the waypoint-traveling with the GPS and a pre-laid out dead reckoning scheme. In the dead reckoning scheme, I had such-and-such paddle strokes for each leg and a magnetic compass heading. I compared that with the GPS waypoint traveling. This was in a thick fog going from NE Harbor out to Little Cranberry. The waypoints tended to only be accurate to about 200m - probably not limited by the GPS itself, but my ability to input features using a map. Map accuracy tends to be worse than the intrinsic resolution of GPS'es. As it is now, I'm mainly a map and compass guy, even in the fog. Last week in the Jonesport/Machias area, one of the guys I paddled with had a GPS, but we never used it - just stuck to map and compass.

Rick - Yup, that's the guy. Interesting blog. I always wondered how people can 'make a living' doing that kind of thing. The owners of Cohills are Philadelphia transplants - there are all these sports posters - Flyers, Eagles, Phillies around the place. Ed - We had the ebb crossing from the Libbys on Tuesday afternoon, and the flood in the morning crossing to the Rogue Archipelago on Wed morning. I was surfing (finally) on the flood on Wed AM, once I figured it out (could've surfed on Tuesday, had I known that trick).

Rick - Yes, "Glenn" sounds right. After I left, I said "was it Glenn?" and either Bill or Dan said "No, I think it was Greg"....so, thanks for the correction. I'm trying to hunt down his blog from that trip. Thanks, John

Finally, finally, finally, I got out on a camping trip downeast. Yippee!! I know a guy named Dan Carr who is on the MITA board of directors. He invited me to join him and a friend, Bill Wertz, on a paddle out of Jonesport. I'd already paddled west/south from Jonesport, as had Dan and Bill, so we decided to head east/north this time. We left Jonesport on Sunday AM with the flood tide, crossed over from the mainland into the Rogue Archipelago. The water was flat as a mirror, and you really couldn't tell that there was any current there. It was a bit overcast with some drizzles. That stretch of coast is truly amazing - you have these distant islands, and your whole sense of size and perspective gets messed up. Two mile crossings are pretty much the norm. We worked along the north side of the south islands in the archipelago, stopping at one MITA island for a nice view out to the Brothers, then did a two mile crossing to another, where we camped. We made the hop of 11 NM by noon and just put up our tents and explored. The island had some sheep on it - and the strangest damn thing - we found a string that was leading up into the sky, with nothing evidently attached to it. I hauled in the string for about 10 minutes and finally found a kite emerging from the fog and clouds. Strange. The next day (Monday), we paddled up into Machias Bay and stopped at an island where there are some native american petroglyphs. It was fun hunting them down and trying to figure out what they were. Then we paddled past a large VLF (very low frequency) array for communicating with submarines on the Cutler peninsula, and camped on a MITA island that was home to an Outward Bound outpost. It was a wonderful site, but unfortunately we hit a mosquito hatch. You have to expect such things. In the channel between the island and Cutler Peninsula, there was a reasonably swift current. There was a full moon on Sunday, and the age of the tide was such that the biggest tides were on Tuesday. With the full moon on a perigee, the tides were about 2 feet higher above MHHW and 2 feet lower than MLLW, but still not astronomically large - still big, and big currents. On Tuesday, we did an outer crossing of Machias Bay, going from Cross Island - we used the Libby Islands as an intermediate point. We were trying to time it so that we missed the bulk of the ebb tide. As we approached Libby, however, the wind picked up - gusts maybe to 20 kts - not horrible, but we'd been paddling about 6-7 NM by that time, so we decided to take a break in the lee of Big Libby. When we came out around the north side of Big Libby, the wind had subsided a bit, but we were now in the thick of the ebb against the wind. Now, this was an interesting lesson for me. Dan has a lot of experience from white water paddling, and I later got a great bit of advice from him. As it was the waves and wind against the current was sloppy for me - the waves seemed to be hitting at random angles, and I was frustrated that I was executing more steering strokes than forward strokes - just kind of slopping around. It was a roller coaster for sure, but I wanted to be more in control. We got back to the island we camped at on Sunday night, after that 2 mile crossing from the LIbbys. There was a huge thunderstorm that passed to our north and hit Calais, but missed us. On Wednesday, we started back, but in the morning, we were dealing with a flood tide. the wind had shifted around to the NE, so again it was wind against tide. The crossing over to the Rogue archipelago was relatively uneventful, but when we hit the archipelago, each island intensified the wind-against-current effect. First there was Halifax. In the crossings, I felt the same sloppiness where I had to execute too many steering strokes for my taste. Then, Dan taught me a great trick, which I suppose many of you already know. I was previously trying to do a point-to-point paddle, but was getting sloppy quartering seas. If you just surf the waves, you can effectively set up a ferry angle. When you do this, you're using gravity to fight the current. Well, I was off to the friggin races with this one - I was surfing, and basically had to execute far fewer steering strokes, just the occasional stern rudder with some edging to stay on the wave. I was having a blast. I wish I'd known about this earlier, but I'm sure going to remember this in the future. That was great! We had a snack and then did a last crossing to the mainland and into Jonesport. We decided to shower up at an inn in Lubec, Cohills. The guy behind the desk was named Greg, and had paddled the coast from Florida all the way up to Lubec and then just stopped in Lubec - go figure. Anyway, he had some interesting stories about that paddle and the danger zones. Thursday was mainly sightseeing, but also kind of a recon. The tides on the Bold Coast from Machias/Cutler up to Lubec are monsterous, and there are mostly huge cliffs. The tide race off Quoddy Head light was quite something. We then drove around Cobbscook Bay to the reversing falls there, and caught them at max flood. Geeze, what a sight - biggest reversing falls I've ever seen with huge boils, a large central whirlpool and a lot of huge waves. Dan had paddled from Cutler around Quoddy and into Cobbscook a couple of years ago. He said he was doing 9 knots with the tide at one point. He also played a bit in the Cobbscook Falls - but they looked pretty awe inspiring. I don't think I'd go near them in a boat until I do a bunch more white water work. Anyway, it was a fantastic trip - although Dan's not an NSPN member, I'm grateful for the invitation and also for some of the stuff he taught me on the trip. Great stuff!!

The attached figure is some esoterica I played with for an upcoming trip out of Jonesport, ME. One of the things we like to do before a trip is make sure we have information about the tides and currents. Since downeast Maine is famous for both of these, I wanted to investigate a bit. Now, we might put all this information down as numbers in a table for reference, but I wanted to look at it graphically just to see what was going on and try to make sense out of it. First - the period of the graph is June 22 through June 27th. There is a full moon early on in this period - and it has a declination of -20 degrees - reaching its largest right around the time of the full moon. The sun has a declination of +23 degrees, so you're getting a lot of tidal whallop going on in this period. The low tide drops a couple feet below MLLW. Another thing I wanted to do was correlate current and the phase of the tide itself. One would naively think that slack tide would correspond to the high and low tides, and that the maximum flood current would come halfway between a low and high, and that the maximum ebb would come halfway between a high and a low. You can take a look at the graph and decide for yourself - I point out the time of slack, max flood and max ebb along with the tidal cycle - it's interesting when they occur. You might also notice a difference in the size of the tide depending on the timing of the moon. A "near transit" is when the moon passes directly overhead - on the "meridian", which is a line that runs from due north, through the zenith and then due south. The "far transit" when the moon is on the other side of the earth from us. The tide data were from Steele Harbor, the current data from the east end of Moosabec reach - these are close enough to each other to basically be the same (little variation in tide heights)

Suz - Great one! I think I'm going to title my next book "Indecent Exposure in the Intertidal Zone" JH

Thanks, Scott - yes, that's sort of the point. I had a couple of traps wash up on my shore, and I didn't know who to report them to, but I tried a good faith effort to put out the word, and finally took them off the beach. It's a painful process - but I was guessing after a good faith effort and a certain amount of time passing that you can remove them.

Two questions for anyone who might know - what does the purpose of 'navigation' mean in the context of inter-tidal zone activities? This is more of a curiosity for me. Whoops....answered my own question: The right to fish includes the right to seek or take any fish, shellfish, or floating marine plants, from a vessel or on foot;The right to navigate includes the right to conduct any activity involving the movement of a boat, vessel, float, or other watercraft, as well as the transport of people and materials and related loading and unloading activity; andThe right to fowl includes the right to hunt birds for sport as well as sustenance. (The Massachusetts Attorney General takes the position that the right of fowling also includes other ways that birds can be "used," such as birdwatching, but also notes that this issue has not yet been addressed by the courts.)The other one is on fishing gear. In my understanding, a person isn't supposed to touch fishing gear that washes up on one's property, but let the fisherman pick it up in due time. I'm assuming that there's some kind of time limit on this, right?

I don't think this is necessarily germane to Rick's point, but there are some obscure laws that grant passage to fishermen in a zone between low and high tide in some states. I have to say that I get confused on this part of the law in Massachusetts. I do own land with beach, and have many people pass by on it - we don't really mind, but once a summer, some group plops down right at the foot of our stairs - we try to be mellow about it, but it can be a bit annoying.

That's pretty much true for any private stretch of land - not sure why you're singling out islands along the Maine coastline. There are some 'high travel' areas where this is particularly true. The same statement goes for bird preserves - any human presence adds to stress of some species of birds. It's sort of like it's the birds' own private turf. Areas that come to mind are Petite Manaan Is. and S. Monomoy (or whatever we're calling it these days).

That happened to my deck mounted compass a few times. Like Suz and other suggested, you might want to bang next to it or 'alligator wrestle' the thing. Nothing's infallible, so, yeah, redundancy is a good thing. I participated in an orienteering race last Saturday. I had a brand spanking new lensatic compass with me, having been convinced it was more accurate than a backpacker compass. Well, I rapidly found out it had its shortcomings - the dial stuck a few times and I had to twitch it a bunch of times with my fingers, and it took me a lot longer to get bearing (details available upon request). I cursed myself for not bringing a backup. Still, I finished the race....but with a crummy time.

Sign me up for one of those suckers. I love old scientific instruments! Where can I get one?