Chincoteague

After Henry left for home I headed out to catch up with a kayaking weekend already in progress. A group of my kayaking friends had rented a quirky old house (formerly owned by actress Linda Lavin!) in the sleepy seaside town of Chincoteague, VA. They had all arrived on Friday. By the time I got there on Saturday evening the group had finished paddling for the day and everyone was well into dinner preparation and tequila ingestion. I unloaded my stuff and carted it up to the room I was sharing with Rob P. Like any good old Victorian house this one had been cobbled together and expanded over the years, and so to get to our room you went through the laundry room, turned right, then climbed the curving back stairs to a room over what I think was at one time a garage. Nice view of the water, plenty of room. I came back downstairs and joined the party just in time for a dinner of fresh local flounder. 

Lavinder House

 

It had been a grey drizzly day and the evening too was cool and breezy. We hung out inside and socialized until it was time for bed. As usual, I was one of the last off to bed. When I got upstairs I discovered that Rob has started sleeping with a CPAP. While the use of the device resolves his notoriously loud snoring, I was surprised when I walked into our bedroom to find Rob asleep with his mask on and a machine whooshing away next to him.

Sunset from Rob's and My Room

  We awoke Sunday to find it blowing pretty hard outside and so we set to work poring over charts, books and web sites to find a sheltered place to paddle. Launch at Snow Hill onto the Pocomoke? That's been our bad weather bailout on many Assateague trips. We decided that we're all tired of Snow Hill. Instead we chose what looked to be a fairly narrow and protected area between Chincoteague and Assateague Islands. The paddling group was Paul and Carrie, Suzanne, Jim, Steven and me. Mike and Linda, Marilyn, and Rob opted out. After getting parking permits in town (I wouldn't have thought of this) we drove to a nearby boat ramp and got underway. We first paddled north up to a point where there was a bridge and the waterway turned to a more exposed angle. We could see that the wind was blowing pretty hard up on the other side of the bridge, with whitecaps forming on the water. Steven and Paul headed up that way to play in the rough water; the rest of us turned around and headed south.

Lighthouse Landing Party

 Carrie, Suzanne, Jim and I decided to see if we could visit the Assateague lighthouse from the water. A little poking around revealed a (technically off limits) boat ramp where we went ashore. The place was really buggy - even I got a mosquito bite (mosquitos generally ignore me). We walked up to the lighthouse but opted not to climb it as there was a line and maybe even a fee. Of course, we were all also decked out in kayaking gear - which got us some looks from the other visitors - and which was really the wrong wardrobe for lighthouse climbing. After using the (technically off limits) Porta-potty we headed back down the (technically off limits) trail back to our boats.

Pensive

We knocked around for a bit more and, rejoined by Paul and Steven, landed at a park back on the Chincoteague side of the water for a lunch break. As we were landing Suzanne came too close to where some folks were fishing and wound up snagging someone's fishing line on her kayak, leading to lots of jokes about what a catch she was, how the fisherman had to throw her back, and threats of Photoshops of Suzanne hung upside down like a prized catch.

After lunch we decided to go out for "a little more" paddling. Carrie knew that "a little more" could mean hours more and so she dropped out. The park where we took our lunch break was pretty close to our original launch site and so she said she'd just paddle back and wait for us. The rest of us headed back out. The wind had dropped some but it was still pretty choppy. We followed along the shore (we saw some ponies in the distance at one point) and continued into the open crossing across Tom's Cove on the back side of Assateague - about a couple of miles across. The wind and the current made for a challenging crossing. Once we made it across we took a break at the southern end of Assateague where we strolled the wide, open beach. We didn't want to stay too long since we knew we had some significant conditions on the way home, with tide, wind and current. Just looking out from shore we could see there was a strong current out towards the ocean - easily noticed by observing boats sliding past the beach sideways, as they were pushed past us by the current.

Assateague Beach - Tom's Cove

The trip back across Tom's Cove was work. We had to set a significant ferry angle to counteract the wind and current (vector math: if you want to go straight across and the current is pushing you to the left, then you have to paddle aiming to the right of where you want to end up - this is called a ferry angle), but while it was harder work going back, I found it easier to maintain direction on the way back than on the way over. By the time we got back into the more protected water I was running low on steam and I was quite happy when we finally made it back to the launch.

Back at the house we rendezvoused with the non-paddling group. They had done a long walk on Assateague Island but had been back at the house for a while. Dinner soon got under way - chicken with winter squash and some rice. Another delicious meal. After dinner Paul and I serenaded the group on guitar and keyboard and then we all chilled out until bed time, when I once again drifted off to sleep to accompaniment of Rob's whooshing hyperbaric chamber.

Music

On Monday the majority of the group woke up on shpilkes to get home. Suzanne had a case that was blowing up at work and so she and Marilyn hit the road. Paul and Carrie had been traveling a long time (they had been in North Carolina at a wedding before this weekend) and were eager to get home. Mike and Linda hit the road too. That left Rob, Steven, Jim and me. The four of us did a roughly five mile outing out of the park up the street from the house, exploring the downtown section of the town of Chincoteague from the water. We paddled into a little cove to check out the boats at the Coast Guard station and were promptly chased away by Coast Guardsmen (for the record, the area was not posted off limits in any way, though I guess it was technicall off limits). We got back to the cars at a good time as it started spattering rain soon thereafter. We loaded our boats and we too started the long ride home.

Spotted Near Town

Getting in Trouble with the Coast Guard