The Assabet River was aerating and accelerating at a very good clip as it tumbled over the Powdermill Dam in Acton the morning after our Christmas Day deluge. According to the USGS gauge in Maynard the river would crest at around 4.75' in the early morning hours of Sunday.
Late on Sunday morning the inscription at Egg Rock showed only bits of the first three words...
Working my way upriver on the Assabet was slow going with resting breaks enjoyed in expanded sloughs. As I began my downriver trip I encountered Roger, another river regular...
...who'd worked his way up the Concord and Assabet rivers from the launch at Bedford. Back at the confluence we encountered a tandem kayak paddling in from the Sudbury...
Things were almost getting crowded!
Yesterday morning I wondered if the high water levels might afford entry into the Pantry Brook Wildlife Area from the Sudbury River. A paddle down from Sherman's Bridge found the answer to be both yes and no...
Enough water to easily paddle over the dam but there was still enough ice there to discourage doing so.
I was beginning to think the clouds wouldn't give way when shortly after seeing this hawk...
...a glimpse of hope appeared on the horizon to the south...
So I paddled in that direction going past Sherman's Bridge...
The further south I went the sunnier and warmer it got so that after paddling under the, no longer in use, Town Bridge in Wayland...
...my return trip seemed to be across a sunlit lake rather than a winding river channel...
Pretty sure I saw the same tandem kayak that I saw the day before on the Concord River. The day had warmed into the mid 40s F.
Being that this was most likely my last paddle of this very strange year it was only fitting that I'd encounter a few floating oddities such as:
This message in a bottle?...
...an empty Landshark Lager bottle (island-style by Margarita Brewing of St. Louis) "Fins Up"...
...artists' crayons dry as a bone inside a jar...
...perhaps the best-looking water bottle I've ever encountered...
Trash gathered up along the way on these last two paddles...
So the year in a nutshell? A tough one for many folks who lost so much. Almost everyone had their plans drastically altered by this unwelcome COVID virus. I've been fortunate to have suffered little more than having camping/paddling trips to far-off waters put on hold until better times return. In the meantime I found my paddling activities reduced, for the most part, to some 24 river boat launches all within a 21-mile radius of home. Put to cardboard it ended up looking like this...
With a roll of the dice I can make a quick decision as to where I'll launch. One roll for the "Inner Limits" (1 - 12) and a second roll for the "Outer Limits" (13 -24). Yeah, I'm ready to turn the page!
May 2021 bring better times and expanded horizons for us all.
On a few occasions I did venture further afield within Massachusetts by combining paddling and car-camping. It was on one such trip to the Connecticut River in May when I experienced eye-to-eye contact with this modern-day petroglyph created by a Native American...
...my most enduring image from the past year.
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