An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

I'm trying to figure out what year the Pirates of Georgetown Halloween party tradition started. The earliest pictures I have are from 2003, but I have fuzzy memories that it may have started a year or two earlier. In any case, it has become an annual tradition which attracts kayakers not just from the Georgetown group but from the entire Chesapeake Paddlers Association. The party is always bittersweet - as fun as it is to hit the water in costume, it also marks the end of the club-sanctioned Thursday evening paddling season. There are people at the party who I won't see again until April. Without question it marks the end of languid evenings by the river. Soon the staff at Jack's will tow the docks away for the year, leaving only the small winter dock. Those of us who go out over the Winter are facing the cold months ahead - months of freezing hands and uncomfortable dry suits. But for tonight, all is well. There are rubber duckies floating in a pool of duck blood (which ...

Ted and I took advantage of a beautiful Autumn day to take a geocaching hike in Hemlock Overlook regional park. Hemlock is the only one I had never visited of the chain of parks along the Occoquon River. That's because its primary use is as an outdoor eduction facility (jointly run by the parks authority and a local university). It turns out that in addition to that stuff there are hiking trails that are open to the public. So we headed out to do some hiking and find some geocaches . One thing about caching is that it can take you far off the trail and get you pretty completely spun around. Even with two GPS receivers in hand, after two caches we had no idea of where the trail was anymore, but we quasi-backtracked and eventually found ourselves on a trail that led down to and along the banks of the river. It rained like crazy yesterday and so the trails, while not muddy, were a little slippery. Ted, as usual, was hiking in Crocs and had no problems negotiating the trail (he was al...

One of the things I love about kayaking is the feel of the seasons changing. Unfortunately, in Fall this also means the end of the officially sanctioned weekly paddling groups (there are people who go out all Winter, but those people are crazy - that reminds me, I have to dig out my Winter paddling gloves). The "Pirates of Georgetown" group's season always ends with a Halloween party on the docks, including paddling in costume along the Georgetown waterfront. A hearty potluck beckons back at the boathouse, and so the Halloween trip is usually pretty short. So, the week before Halloween is the last full scale outing. It was near high tide when we set out and so we decided to brave the Boundary Channel, a thin, twisty stretch of water that runs between Columbia Island and Virginia. The channel is impassable except near high tide. It also has a surprisingly remote feeling, bounded as it is by highways and the Pentagon. I've seen wood ducks happily nesting back there. A c...

A couple of days ago I was a recipient of an email from a friend who was organizing a kayak trip out to Thomas Point Lighthouse in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. In and of itself this was nothing unusual, as this particular friend frequently organizes challenging paddles around the Bay. What was different this time, though his email didn't mention it, was that his cancer had returned in a big way. The unmentioned (though known to most of us) motivation for this trip was to provide an opportunity for him to do something he loved while on a break from chemo. Now, I was doubtful that someone in his condition could do anything like the fourteen miles of open water paddling that this trip would entail. I had no doubt, though, that he wanted his friends' support. This was a prime, if out of the ordinary, chance to perform the mitzvah (moral and spiritual obligation) of Bikur Cholim , or visiting the sick. As one web site describes it: Bikur cholim is a term encompassing a wide ra...