Joseph Berkovitz

Jim - do you know if the park boat launch area will be open? 

Thank you for saving this date… Prez!

The video of last night's presentation is now up at:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CxY-LNvsWk

Thanks to everyone who could attend!

Reminder: Please use the Google forms signup link, if you want to officially record your interest in this trip. Janet and I don’t keep track of forum responses, and the form also asks some specific questions. 

this thread is just for general q&a regarding the trip.

j

And... to answer the question that a number have already asked: yes, this session will be recorded and a link to the video made available!

Hi all,

This is just a reminder that Wednesday 3/15/23 (tomorrow) night at 7pm I'll be delivering a Zoom seminar on how to use my website FloatingTrails.com to plan your upcoming paddles in New England, print custom charts and other useful stuff.

Club members can find the Zoom Meeting information in the NSPN Business forum by clicking the link below (you must be signed in as a member to view it):

https://www.nspn.org/forum/topic/14619-zoom-link-to-nspnfloatingtrailscom-trip-planning-seminar/

-Joe

To those who expressed interest on this thread last year, please see:

Janet Lorang and I are organizing a trip to Grand Manan Island in New Brunswick, just past the Bold Coast. The trip is planned for a long weekend, arriving the afternoon of Thursday September 7 and departing on Monday September 11, 2023.  We will be camping at the lovely Anchorage Provincial Park, where spots have already been reserved for this trip.

Grand Manan is a large island of almost 60 square miles in New Brunswick, Canada that sits right at the junction of the Gulf of Maine and the Bay of Fundy. While it faces the Bold Coast across the Grand Manan Channel, the island is completely different from the mainland. Grand Manan features an enormous range of landscapes, including towering basalt cliffs, sea arches and an archipelago of low-lying islands. The eastern side of Grand Manan is lightly settled and features an active fishing and aquaculture industry. On the other hand, the rugged western coast and outlying small islands to the south and east are completely wild and uninhabited. It is an incredible place to visit and to paddle. You can read about my experience there last year with Bob Levine in this trip report.

The trip will consist of about 8 paddlers.

This is is not an area in which to paddle casually, and all of the trip should be considered as L3+. Paddlers joining this trip should be prepared for:

- Daily trips of 12-15 miles, with limited bailout options. Much of the area is roadless wilderness, often with no opportunity to land safely,
- Strong currents (> 4 knots in some places) and turbulent eddy lines.
- Cold water, often in the low 50s even in high summer, with air temps in the 60s. Assume that a drysuit is essential most days.
- Rough water conditions on a very exposed coastline where waves interact with rocks, weather, and current.
- Sudden changes in weather and sea conditions. The island sits well offshore in the Atlantic Ocean with plenty of wind fetch on all sides. Dense fog and poor visibility are common.
- The need to stay in a cohesive pod and maintain strong situational awareness.
- An international border crossing requiring a passport.

We will organize daily paddles Friday-Sunday. Some may leave directly from the beach at the Anchorage while others will require a drive. We will determine plans for each day based on weather, sea and tidal conditions. We want to stay safe!  (If paddling is ruled out for any part of the trip, the island is also a world-class hiking destination.)

In terms of logistics, plan for 6-7 hours of road travel to reach the Blacks Harbour ferry terminal from the Boston area. Individual arrangements can be made to extend your stay earlier or later subject to availability of campsites.  Please work that out with us up front.
 
Each person's share of the campsite rental will run to a total of $50-75 USD for the 4 nights - the exact amount will depend on the final group size.

The ferry rates run about $35 USD per vehicle, $10 USD per person. We'll figure out the ferry cost when we know the number of cars.

Please indicate your interest in the trip by filling out this form:

https://forms.gle/LEKgm76qPNCjnC4W6

Based on responses, Janet and Joe expect to finalize the list of attendees in the next few weeks. We don't want to bias the trip towards those who are able to respond to this post right away, so we'll use random selection plus some personal judgment to form a group. Once we've done that, we'll respond to everyone who expressed interest. At that time we'll collect a deposit from everyone who wants to commit to the trip.

Hope to see you there!

, I use Aquaseal on the inside of a suit for pinpoint leaks and it works perfectly. That product you showed above is a water repellent, not a watertight sealant. It won’t create a water barrier that stays sealed under water and air pressure. 

For small leaks I turn the suit inside out, mask around the leak (on the inside) with tape and apply a generous layer of aqua seal on the leak, then when the seal becomes firmer but still tacky I remove the tape. This leaves a clean square of flexible aqua seal over the leak. 

for non pinpoint leaks I would apply a patch from a dry suit or goretex repair kit on top of the aquaseal before it dries. 

NRS and Kokatat sell kits including both patches and little Awuaseal tubes. 

Hi folks,

In a few weeks on March 15 I'm giving a Zoom workshop for paddlers on how to make the best use of my website floatingtrails.com. I've been very busy working on it this winter and I'm excited to share its new capabilities with everyone!  This will be a fun event, not a highly technical workshop, because the site is simple and easy to use. My goal is simply to demonstrate what we can do with it as paddlers.

If you haven't tried FloatingTrails.com yet, it is basically a single place on the web for us paddlers and small boat owners to plan our trips. It lets you:

• explore the United States coastline
• access weather/ocean observations and predictions
• interactively explore tide and current predictions for future dates
• print high-quality navigation charts of any area
• find area locations to launch, visit and camp
• plan routes with bearings and mileages
• easily share a custom map as a web link

If you're already familiar with FloatingTrails.com, I have some surprises for you! The site has now expanded to cover the whole United States including AK/HI and territories, and it can print high-quality charts right from your browser. The resulting charts can include custom routes, magnetic grid lines, visual tide predictions for any date, and landmarks as you please. In most of New England, you can still print the original raster charts too. 

If you think you'd like to come, please sign up below:

https://www.nspn.org/forum/calendar/event/1393-using-floatingtrailscom-to-plan-your-paddle/

I'll be sending out a zoom link the morning of the event.

Hope to see you there,

Joe

I’d be interested in this trip if the timing works out. 

from a planning perspective I think the key to the circumnav (if starting from knubble) is to go CCW so that one is descending the Kennebec on the ebb which is lots of fun. That means making it up through Hell Gate on the flood (or at least the early ebb) in the morning before going up the Sasanoa and entering the Kennebec at Bath. Then you need the flood in goose rocks passage to start early enough that you’re not fighting it to get back into knubble bay  

I used floatingtrails to discover a couple of weekends that work. See this links: Sat. 5/13 is nice with a good strong ebb. Early start required to avoid ebb in Lower Hell (slack ~7 am) although one can go up the channel to the west of it; Sunday would be more forgiving. Weekends of 8/26 and 9/9 work well but Kennebec ebb only about 70% compared with the earlier date. Lower Hell slack around 8 or 8:30 am those days. 

Thanks for posting, Clay - it's great to have another local option!

Rob, thanks for everything you’ve done and all the effort you’ve put into the club. I hope you’ll stay involved and keep paddling with all of us!

Sue, a huge thumbs up to you: I know you will accomplish great things in this role. 
 

joe

Amen, Gary. 

These photos were all taken near high water today (between 9 and 11am) in Marblehead. Although the wind and swell were coming from the SE (at right angles to the harbor mouth), waves wrapped in very heavily on the more exposed north side of town.

Front St near Fort Sewall (this house stayed completely dry inside according to the guy who maintains it):

Gas House Lane:

Little Harbor. I spoke to one of the lobster shack owners who said the water had reached to about an inch below his floor:

The Barnegat neighborhood, flooded:

The interior of the dining room at The Landing (which was, yes, closed at the time as the floor was buckling up and down as each wave passed through):

I also have both neck and wrist repair forms available for loan. I live in Marblehead. 

Awesome - thank you Mike for making this happen again!!!!

Max: I live in Marblehead and paddle through the winter as opportunity arises (and it frequently does). Jim gave you a good explanation of the situation with respect to winter paddles in the club. They are generally short notice and circulate on informal email lists.

Once you are listed as a member then we can exchange emails and then arrange to get in touch when there’s a weather window. For us it can be a same day thing even, since put ins are a few minutes drive. Let’sjust meet up in town and say hello even if the weather is crappy.

Other members: if you have cold water equipment and are reasonably experienced on the water and would like to paddle in the wintertime please PM me or post here. I feel we can and should have more wintertime activity in the club as long as we are really careful about the safety and composition of the trips. Can’t promise what will happen, but key to these trips is having a pre-assembled list of people who are OK with paddling with each other in cold water situations where consequences are obviously more serious should anything go wrong. 

The tests are charged for these days. 

I was doing the periodic service club thing for a while, like David, but I seem to need yearly replacements (is it my skin chemistry?) so it’s become too expensive.  Now I have all the repair stuff at home for gaskets and patches and I’m just doing the testing and repairs myself. 

Unfortunately will not be able to attend after all…

People do not seem to be using the calendar to sign up. If you’re interested here is the link to the calendar entry:

https://www.nspn.org/forum/calendar/event/1376-full-moon-paddle-plus-more/

I couldn't believe it when I saw geologist Dyk Eusden's Zoom presentation last year for MITA. A geologist who investigates sites by... sea kayaking? Too good to be true! I immediately knew there was a future NSPN trip in the making, assuming Dyk was willing to come on board.

Fortunately Dyk agreed readily to do the trip with NSPN, and it just took place this last Saturday and Sunday. Besides Dyk (who is a retired geology professor from Bates College and an expert on Maine coastal geology) we had myself, co-organizer Janet Lorang, Beth Sangree, Cath Kimball, Dana Siegall, Shari Galant, Bob Levine, Ricardo Caivano, and Steph Golmon. The goal was to do some hands-on learning by making geological maps of the NE tip of the island, preceded and followed by some explanation from Dyk.

The original trip plan called for Dyk and the entire group to camp over Saturday night on Little Whaleboat and E. Gosling, with geology activities Saturday daytime and Sunday morning followed by some pleasure paddling on Sunday afternoon, with some returning home Saturday, others camping out on Sunday night too. This plan had to be curtailed when Sunday morning's forecast called for the sudden onset 20+ kt NNE winds gusting to over 30 kt. We would have to get Dyk and a few others back to the launch by the end of Saturday, so our session was shorter than called for. However, it worked out great anyway.

Saturday's weather was perfect as we paddled east from Cousins towards our destination. Dyk is the smiling guy in the yellow kayak nearest the camera:

Arriving at Little Whaleboat, we were initiated by Dyk into the geologic history of the area. I won't go into all the science here... but... let's just say that hundreds of millions of years ago there were some ancient volcanoes (ash fell and collected) and some silty rivers (mud collected). All these layers of ash and silt wound up deep underground where they got cooked and melted and deformed. They also got squished (by the same plate collision that created the Appalachians) and stretched and distorted by a fault called the Norumbega, not too dissimilar from the West Coast's modern-day San Andreas Fault. Cracks opened up from time to time and filled up with other kinds of molten rocks that then solidified. Finally millions of years of erosion eventually exposed this underground stuff in what is now Casco Bay.

Below Dyk is pointing out the boundary between some gniess (cooked/melted ash falls) and a basalt dike (where Ricardo is standing):

Dyk showed us how to measure the angles where rock boundaries come together:

People asked LOTS of amazing questions and Dyk did a tremendous job of answering them all in language we could mostly understand. The sun was out a lot of the time and it was calm and pretty warm. Good times and good science!

At the end of the day our brains were pretty tired. Dyk and 4 paddlers went back to Cousins (unfortunately Janet was one of them). 5 paddlers including yours truly, Ricardo, Dana, Beth and Cath headed off to East Gosling. Gary York was also camping on the south side of the island and he came by to say hello. That night the wind ramped up just as predicted, howling through the early hours. It cooled off radically and we spent the morning in camp eating and drinking hot food and thinking about paddling, looking out at the weather. Eventually by the afternoon we decided to beat north into the wind and explore the upper reaches of Casco including a visit to the Helen and Walter Norton Preserve on Birch Island, expecting a nice downwind run back to camp before sunset. Only, the wind cheated us and died down once we reached the turnaround point. Oh well! It was nice to get out on the water after all! The camping finished with a near-perfect campfire on the south side of the island where we were completely sheltered from the breeze and could revel in the moonlight and the flames:

:

Monday morning was lovely, sunny and mostly calm as we broke camp and made our way back to Cousins Island at low water, threading through the sandbars near the bridge. A great trip!!!

Thanks to everyone for making this happen, especially Dyk. It was great to have a paddle that allowed us to learn from an expert about the environment we journey in, and appreciate the planet more.

J

I would love to do this if it winds up not on the same date as the Little Whaleboat trip. 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/23/cyril-derreumaux-california-hawaii-kayak
 

I was fortunate to meet Cyril a few years ago in SF at an event where he was fundraising. He finally made it! I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about this. 

Hi folks,

I will be in Maine next week and unable to organize the final scheduled Wed. Lunch Paddle of this year. If anyone wants to step up and organize one, please do go ahead, and enjoy!

Next year there will be more of them, I am sure.

-Joe