Belle Isle Trip - Day 1

Today was Day 1 of a three day kayaking and camping trip. My friend Rob and I planned this trip somewhat at the last minute in place of Kayaker Ed’s Thousand Islands trip, which was cancelled due to Kayaker Ed’s back problems.

I wheeled into the Warsaw, VA McDonald’s about 15 minutes ahead of the planned meeting time to find Rob already there. A good sign – I like punctuality. We continued on to Belle Isle State Park, where the person checking us into the campground seemed almost surprised to see us. I later realized this was because, for some reason, the campground was all but deserted. I’m not sure why that would be the case for such a beautiful park in the middle of summer vacation season. But anyway, the check-in person assigned us a nice site and promised that she wouldn’t put anyone in the adjacent site – an easy promise to keep, given that it turned out that only four of the thirty sites were occupied. It felt like we had the place to ourselves.

Lagoon

After setting up our tents and Rob’s nifty shade canopy we headed out for our first paddle of the trip. We set out from the park’s car-top launch, which is nicely located in a quiet little creek. We paddled out of the creek and turned northwest into the Rappahannock River (upriver). I’m more familiar with the piddly little upriver section of the Rappahannock near Fredericksburg and so it was nice to discover how large the river felt down near its mouth – it’s several miles wide, in fact. The shoreline along this section is fairly developed with houses but is still pretty. We cruised along, sightseeing and just generally enjoying being out on the water. In particular we noticed the popularity of red metal roofs.

We ducked into Farnham Creek. Just at the creek mouth there’s a little spit of land that creates something of a lagoon. The lagoon was like an idyllic little oasis and turned out to be an excellent place to take a break. It also gave us a chance to do some nature watching: we saw herons, cattle egret, and even a dinner plate sized jellyfish. Since I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast back home I hungrily munched down some trail mix and whatever other snack food I had with me. We spent quite a while there just reveling in being out in nature … and away from the office.

Me taking a break at the lagoon

Rob relaxing at the lagoon

Because of the heat we decided not to paddle further, so we started heading back. The wind had picked up and so we crunched through some light chop. The design of my boat is such that it cuts through waves rather than going over them. The advantage of this is that you don’t get the pounding that you do with a more buoyant bow, but you get a wetter ride when paddling into the waves and, I noticed, have the bow dive into each wave really slows the boat down. I suddenly found myself working pretty hard to keep up with Rob. At the time I thought he had gotten a strong second wind and was sprinting back to the put-in, but in retrospect I think it was mostly the difference in how our boats performed in the chop.

Upon our return to the campsite we relaxed with appetizers (wine and cheese, and canned oysters for Rob) then cooked our dinner (burgers, cucumber salad, and fresh corn). A tasty end to an enjoyable first day.