On My Trip Down The Concord River

My beautiful wife and I went down to the Concord River today. I knew that the put-in was on Lowell Road and as we got close I began to worry that I wouldn't find the put-in spot. That was time I'll never get back and, as it turns out, time that I could have spent gazing into her eyes or drinking coffee or bashing my head off the windshield. ANY THING would have more productive. There were a million cars there and you could clearly see the beach and the people putting in and taking out and paddling all about from the road. Even a U.N. weapons inspector could have found this place!

We drove down and as we were unstrapping and preparing our boats for launch, one of the other paddlers, who was just finishing up, asked my wife if my JRT (Cooter) was a "kayak dog". My wife got a grand kick out of this and the two women made small talk about dogs and kayaking and all sorts of other stuff and I got the car parked and the boats set. Then, kayak dog perched on her bow, off we went.

Despite the fact that there were so many cars parked along side of the road, the river itself was not at all crowded. We passed or met with several other kayaks along the way. Mostly in groups of two, male and female, in sets of matched 10 and 12 or 12 and 14 foot boats of the same make model and color. At least our kayaks are different colors! Most of them were Wilderness systems but I did see another green Dirigo 140 (just like mine), a Necky, a great long yellow one that I could not identify that looked like it belonged some where other than this lazy river. Curiously enough we also saw three powerboats carrying fisherman. One was a nondescript 15 foot aluminum boat. The other two were sparkle-pained 1970’s vintage Bass boats, with all the electronics and huge engines. If you think that I thought that the long yellow kayak was out of place you can imagine what I thought about a $60,000 Bass boat with a 200 hp outboard on the Concord! What I didn’t see, and it made me sad, were any canoes. If you have read any of my postings before you probably know that I am a canoephile and that I view Kayaks as kind of faddy and annoying. Places like the Charles and the Ipswich and the Concord and the Sacco are all canoeing destinations. Kayaks are for fishing the coast, and for Eskimos. Canoes have a gentle rhythm and a timeless cadence to them as they stroke and glide through the water. Gentle pressures on the paddle subtly altering course or speed. They slip slowly and gracefully through the water. They are beauty in motion. (Of course none of this applies if I am the paddler!). Kayaks? The frantic Dip-Dip-Dip-Dip-Dip-Dip-Dip-Dip of that stupid paddle going up and down is like a little lever inside of an old-fashioned clock. Frantic. Cafine-fuled. It’s X-tream! It the “In Thing”. You have it? I WANT it! Dip-Dip-Dip-Dip-Dip-Dip-Dip-Dip: ZOOOOOMMMMM. Even the old timers looked like they were going fast. Compared to me they probably were! Humbug. Bleah.

So, any way, where was I? Oh yes. On the river dip-dipping my way down stream with my beautiful wife and our Kayak Dog. Cooter was the star of the show! Every one commented or asked questions about him. Even the Powerboat Fishermen thought he was cool. One of them told us that there were 5 foot Pike in the river. We decided that we should be extra careful not to let him fall in! We saw a lot of birds. Ducks and geese and all kind of song birds. We saw turtles and (what I swear to have been) an alligator. The scenery was beautiful and the nearly constant stream of planes coming and going from Hanscome only made me more acutely aware how special it was that such a beautiful place existed in such a densely populated area. About two and one half miles down stream we came across a swan floating in a cove. Wow. I had only ever seen one wild swan before (while motorcycle trail riding of all things) and my wife had never seen one. Neither had Cooter. He was magnificent!
He let us quite close and even when he swam away it was slowly and gracefully and we were duly impressed by his beauty and magnificence and called it a day. Sort of. We still had to get back to the boat ramp.

Along the way we saw more ducks and geese and an older couple “snuggling” in the bushes. My wife got more complements and questions about her well-trained Kayak Dog. A couple was having wedding pictures taken as the wedding party wandered about the grounds (the photographer was the only mammal wild life that we saw that day: she was a Fox!). Then we saw it! It was at the side of the river staked to the bank with a large forked tree branch but it was there. Unmistakable. A canoe!

My heart did a little flutter and I might have swooned just a tiny bit in the cockpit at the sight of that big-ol’ aluminum battleship livery boat parked there. I knew that some couple had come out for the day and were having a romantic pick-nick up in the meadow some where. Perhaps even the near by bride and groom would paddle off into their happy future together in it after the ceremony. Or poets or photographers or painters had paddled it into the conservation area for inspiration. My whimsical day dreams exploded into a storm of fur and feathers as I underwent the Great Duck Attack of 2008.

Now, remember that alligator that I swear I saw? Well, I am fairly certain that, in the best fairy tail tradition, he was talking to and, more importantly, coaching Ms. Duck. I think this because she was sitting quietly at the riverside preening her feathers when she saw me pass by. With nary a sound and her head held low she slipped from the bank and began paddling directly toward me. Her beedy little eyes locked onto me as only a voracious predator can lock-on eyes. I feared The Worst. I was to die here in the Concord River. Home of Thoreau. Birthplace of the American Revolution. In plain site of my beautiful wife (and that cute little photographer). I was to be the latest meal of a carnivorous duck with an identity crisis. I was DOOMED! Doomed I tell you! It was coming right for me.

I had a secrete weapon on my side though. It was sitting quietly, serenely and vigilantly on my wife's bow. That’s right Cooter the Kayak Dog! He had ignored every bird on the river. He gave them noting but his contempt. This one was different. This one was attacking! Little Cooter Scooter (that’s his middle name) came to life in a fury of bristly fur and drooly snarling. Ms. Alligator McDuck had failed to factor him into her attack plans. Due to his brave efforts she reassessed her position as apex predator and quickly paddled herself off to greener, and less toothy pasture. I’m fairly certain that I never laughed so hard in my life. One gain Cooter was the center of attention, the star of the river and, more importantly, a genuine Hero.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. I saw a few more of those livery canoes being less than expertly propelled by less than expert paddlers who were more than expert at causing a ruckus and cussing at each other. Then we got to the put-in, which was to be out take-out and BLAMO! Kayaks all along the shore. Two, three deep in places. Wow! All matched sets. People talking, siting, being in each other’s way. It was a zoo: an angry zoo. Some one mouthed off to my wife when we were getting the boats out of the water. Seems that he thought that we should drag them up the hill so he could park his SUV right at the water’s edge. He was foreign by the sound of him. French I think. Zoo or not it almost became a crime scene. An international incident! In the end Mr. Frenchie backed the frack down and stood the frack by as we jockeyed our stuff out of the way and got the heck out of there! Just in time.

I was conserned that the Concord River would sweep us away and over some dam into the Merrimack and that we would then be further swept away over the dams in Lowell and Lawrance and thence out to sea to be lost for all times. Instead I had a very pleasant day on the river. I learned to hate kayaks a little less, treat French People a little more tolerance, and fear ducks a lot more!

Long Cold Spring Day.

As early as we were, both in terms of the time of the season and in time of the day, we were not the first guys out there, not by a long shot. We got a crummy spot. It was crummy for Scott because he couldn't catch any fish from there. It was crummy for me because I could catch too many trees. I hadn't cast a fishing rod in 20 years or more and the cramped, tree-chocked clearing that we were allotted in the un-official pecking order of The Lake was just not a good place for my antique terminal tackle to be. I lost several lures to the grabby branches of the lake guardians. "How can this be"? you ask, "you were using Power Eggs".
Well I was. To me though, that wasn't fishing. From what little I remember from my childhood, and every thing that I saw on T.V. fishing involved casting and retrieving. A constant motion of flinging and winding. A desperate attempt to keep the lure from snagging on any hidden obstecel. Sitting quietly waiting for a "hit" was foreign to me. Furthermore, since the biggest fish that I have ever caught in the past was a blue gill, I wasn't sure what constituted a hit.

From the behavior of the guys around me I figures that it must be a pretty big thing! All the veteran guys were sitting in their trucks trying to keep warm and watching their rods from across the parking lot. Yet, every so often, they would sprint out into the cold, in the waddling, wobbling way that people who spend too much time sitting in trucks and too little time standing outdoors do and set the hook into a fish that was on the line. Fascinating. If they can do it from the car surely I can do it at the side of the lake. Nope. I got cold. I got tires. I got frustrated. I got determined. I got no fish. My buddy gave up and left. I stayed. I got no fish. The sun gave up and left. I stayed. I got no fish.

I suck.

I'm outdoors!

This, in and of itself, might not seem like such a big thing to most people. To me it's HUGE. You see, between reading and gaming and going to school and then working in a field where 24 hours a week of overtime is considered "normal" there never really was much time in my life for "outdoors". Until this year. For some reason I was out the door and running as soon as the street lights started staying on until after supper. Earlier, actually.

Now, 55 degrees has always been my motorcycling threshold and I suppose that riding my bike in weather over 55 degrees might qualify me as something of an outdoors man, and looking back on it I am pretty sure that taking to motorcycling was my first step to outdoorsmanship. This year it was different though. Winter was worse than normal and even thought I have never considered myself to have SAD, I was more than happy when the first thaw came. I started looking up mountain bike and enduro sites on the web and planning my two wheeled assault on Mother Nature, but it was still too cold and wet and icy. That would have to wait. I still had the bug, the drive though and for whatever reason I decided that this year I was going to take up fishing.

This wasn't exactly a crazy thought. I had a bunch of my fishing stuff from when I was a kid and ALL of my Dad's stuff. I'd been hauling it all around from move to move over the last 14 years of my life. I thought that it was time to put it back to use and in the first weeks of April my partner at work (an avid fisherman) showed me how to tie a couple of knots and off we went to the local pond to "catch fish".

He went to the pond I went to the bait shop for minnows. WTF I was supposed to do with minnow I'm not antierly sure but it didn't matter. I got a call.

"Get Powereggs and the minnows".
"What's a Poweregg"?
"Just ask the guy".
"Hey, you got Powereggs"?
(Chuckling)"Sure do!"

Thirty dollars or so later I had a a collection of Powereggs in every color of the rainbow, some minnows that were big enough to be "keepers' as far as I was concerned and a pile of other terminal tackle including a small hand full of egg sinkers that were on the house. WHat the hell did the tackle store guy care if he ate 40¢ worth of sinkers? He knew that he had me hooked for life, or at leas the first part of the season. Now we had a purpose: a plan. We were fishing for Trout!

My partner Scott is a very gregarious person. Unlike me, who is afraid that other men will think that I am gay if I strike up a random conversation with them, Scott, who just might be gay in the end, will talk to any one. He's like a three yea old child like that. Every one is his next best friend. Any way, while I was shaggin coffee and "bait" he was talking to the other anglers at the pond and found out that they has just stocked the pond with Trout and that Trout ate Powereggs. I was suspect at his avidness since he didn't know about these Trout things or the Power-food which we were supposed to use to catch them. He reassured me that his normal quarry were Stripped Bass, that I shouldn't worry and that every thing was going to be all right. Every thing was all right. If you were a Trout.