Participants: Lois Goldstein, John Heiam, Gail Hastings, Tracie Lord, Jocelyn Trepte, Fred Swartz, and a guest Hal LaLonde.
On this beautiful weekday this small group of intrepid flotsam and jetsam hunters set out with high expectations to collect the remnants of the recent 4th of July holiday while enjoying a quiet paddle. Expectations were not entirely fulfilled.
A Baptist camp chose this day to send 9(?) rafts of kids down the river. I must say that these were exceptionally well-behaved kids - so well-behaved that they weren't generating any trash for us. This is the same camp that last year who warned them not to wear footwear that came off easily, and those who showed up with flip-flops got them taped to their feet (another deficit in the flotsam category). At one point they stopped for a swim break and to leap off a tree trunk spanning the river. Many teens might take this opportunity to cannonball our hapless kayaks, but instead they politely waited for us to pass. Weren't the teenage boys at least thinking about it?
I might fault this group in only one respect -- paddling skills were uneven. Some rafts managed quite well while others were of the ricochet off the banks style. Often the paddlers in the latter rafts worked against one another. A few simple lessons would have helped.
But the official thrust of the trip was trash collection, and here we faltered. There was little trash, and most of it was old. Even the most promising log jams, traditional sources of mountains of bottles, flip-flops, etc, were clean. There must have been unauthorized cleaning of the river after the 4th!
Only a couple of treasures were discovered: Jocelyn found a kayak paddle and Lois found a wet t-shirt. If "wet t-shirt" brings to mind something salacious, you have the right association. This adult-themed shirt looks like it could have come from one of those contests. No one in this politically correct group was going to claim this "treasure".
Even with more company and less trash than we expected, it was extremely enjoyable.
Fred