Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Sure Sign of Spring on the Assabet

Taking advantage of, possibly, the best weather of the week, I spent this afternoon paddling on the Assabet River in Stow.  In doing so I was rewarded with the unmistakable sound of spring: the calls of red-winged blackbirds.  Today's blackbirds, however, chose to be heard and not seen.  I never actually figured out where they were hiding, but nonetheless greatly enjoyed the long-absent sound.

Wood ducks, mallards, Canada geese, and a few red-tailed hawks were also seen on the river.

The portal to Fort Meadow Brook was just a little too small for me to fit through so I continued upriver to the narrow funnel downstream of Gleasondale...


With a swollen Assabet squeezing through the narrow opening at a pretty good clip, I decided against trying to paddle upstream.  Helping to make that decision was the good sized tree rocking in the current just downstream of the funnel...

Avoiding that obstacle would require some quick evasive measures by any paddler.
So, here I turned around and headed back to the takeout at Sudbury Road.

Similar to Sunday, the high river levels resulted in a bounty of floating trash...

My catch included 46 recyclable containers (3 redeemable) and 75 pieces of miscellaneous rubbish  32 of which were nip bottles.  YTD = 536


2 comments:

Erik Eckilson said...

Hey Al - I'll bet those red Wing Blackbirds got a surprise yesterday. Hope all is well.

Al said...

Hello Erik, I suspect they weren't the only ones surprised by yesterday's turn of events!
The rivers around here will bear watching if we get any substantial rainfall in the next few weeks.