Lake Champlain Part 2: Plattsburgh to Valcour Island

Tuesday

Suzanne and I are early risers in the group so it was no surprise when I bumped into her at the stroke of 6 AM at the coffee pot in the hotel breakfast room (my kind of camping breakfast!). Jen followed close behind and I soon found myself engaged in a scintillating conversation about their cats – and how to steal the bananas back from the table of Germans who were monopolizing them. Eventually Tom and Rob joined us and the Germans left, solving both our conversational and fruit challenges. We made plans to head to Peru Dock, from whence we would launch to Valcour Island.

“Ahh, Valcour Island,” you say. “Isn’t that the site of a Revolutionary War naval battle?” Why, yes, it is. American forces under the command of Benedict Arnold (still a good guy at this point in the war!) managed to get shot to pieces by a superior British fleet before limping away. Like many Revolutionary War battles, the Americans didn’t exactly win but managed to do damage to the British by slowing and wearing them down and making the Brits chase them around endlessly. My favorite Revolutionary War general, Nathaniel Greene, is most famous not for a great military victory but for a masterful strategic retreat across the breadth of North Carolina. The way a rebel insurgency beats a superpower’s military is through this kind of slow attrition rather than decisive victories, unless of course you can figure out a way to blow up their Death Star. But I digress.

Valcour Island has some gorgeous rock formations

The crossing to Valcour was short but had the roughest water of the trip to that point. We made the roughly one mile crossing and proceeded clockwise around the island to survey the available campsites. By the time we made it from where we started  around the top of the island, past Spoon Bay and Sloop Bay, through a narrow, surf-pounded passage between two islands, and into Smuggler’s Harbor we had travelled around most of the island and were ready to be done with the waves even though we had paddled only five miles. We declared that we had found the best possible campsite – which indeed, we had! Smuggler’s Harbor, which we alternately referred to as Snogger’s Harbor (though no snogging took place) and Schmuckler’s Harbor, was such a desirable site that even though it was during the work week in the off-season we found it to be frequently visited by other boaters looking for a place to hang out, party or camp. One day we returned from kayaking to find a power boat in “our” harbor, with the owner stark naked on the nearby shore. He quickly pulled on clothes (shirt before pants, I am told – I stopped looking his way after a first glance) and took off.

Smuggler's Cove

Now, here’s where we were bad campers. Schmuckler’s Harbor contained three campsites – well, two and a half: our campsite, another picnic table and fire ring up on an adjacent bluff (this site had no outhouse, no access except through our campsite and almost no place to set up a tent, which is why I label it a half campsite), and a completely separate campsite at the other end of the cove. In all fairness, we could have shared the cove another group but were worried that power boaters would disturb our peace with their seemingly inevitable partying and loud music, so we scattered our gear around enough to make it look like all the sites were occupied. I mean, we were five people with five tents, so we could lay legitimate claim to multiple sites. We wouldn’t have been so territorially greedy in peak season, but the island has twenty-five campsites and in our paddle around we had seen only one other tent and so we felt that even in monopolizing the cove we were leaving plenty of campsites for everyone else. When we were in camp we always left one kayak over at the other site. One time when some power boats came into the Tall Tom went over to the far campsite and plopped down in his chair and glared at the boaters. This wasn’t partial exposure to Tom’s glare – rather, it was full exposure. The boaters left.

Camp craft

The rest of the day Tuesday was consumed with setting up camp and general camp craft. One of the enjoyable things about these trips is tweaking gear and procedures each time. For example, before the trip I sewed a loop of elastic onto the deck of my spray skirt allowing me to keep my GPS right in front of me in my lap rather than having it a foot and a half away on the deck of the kayak. This was a success – it really helped in navigating to be able to continuously consult the GPS. In camp, Tall Tom set up the latest iteration of his camp shower – this time with a battery-powered showerhead! Previous years' iterations were gravity-fed, which meant very little water pressure and the need to hoist heavy bags of water up high. In this version, the bucket of water stayed down low. The handheld shower contained a pump which drew water up a hose from the bucket. I used it only once (I would rather be stinky than cold – my apologies to my fellow campers – and so don’t like getting wet unless it’s pretty warm out), but it was, in fact, very cool. I’m just amazed that Tom had room, even in his big 18 foot boat, for tarps and showers and collapsible buckets. I'm something of a minimalist and still barely fit everything into my kayak. I respect people who hav eth etime and interest to fiddle with stuff like the shower.

Dinner on Weds was Suzanne’s beloved penne with tuna, olives and feta. When the storm passed on Wednesday morning it left behind warmer weather – we all slept comfortably.

Campfire at Smuggler's Cove

The privy at Smuggler's Cove

My tent (center), Rob's and Suzanne's

Wednesday

The weather for the remainder of the week got better by the day. Wednesday was quite a nice day – still breezy, though. We decided to head south to paddle the two mouths of the Ausable River. As the river wends its way towards the lake it splits into two branches and so in essence the river has two mouths. This trip was sort of a two for one: from the island (labelled “almost one rock” in the Revolutionary War map below) to Ausable Point (labelled “Pointe au Sable” on the map) was big water on the open lake. Then, entering the river the feeling totally transformed into the intimacy of small creek paddling – the mouth of the Ausable is small, peaceful, pretty and calm. We paddled up to the junction of the two branches and a bit beyond. As I mentioned earlier, the lake level was low and so we had to get out and walk the boats here and there, and not far beyond the junction the river ceased to be navigable, with some small rapids. At the top of the navigable section we took a snack break and then headed out via the other fork, which required a little fortitude because the transition from the junction to the fork was a small rapid with rapidly moving water and a sharp curve – not ideal for sea kayaks, but not as bad in execution as it looked going into it. We all made it through just fine and had an uneventful trip back to Schmuckler’s Cove. It was my turn to cook dinner, and my two bean and chicken white chili was a success.

The Battle of Valcour Island

Rob stopping to take a photo on the Ausable River

Coming out of the Ausable River back into the main lake

Cooking

You may wonder how we do dishes on these trips. It’s a three step process. First, we dip everything in the lake to scrub off any major residue – leftovers and the like. Yes, the first step in cleaning the dishes is to coat them in giardia, cryptosporidium, motor oil and whatever else might be floating around in the lake. Then we take some hot, soapy filtered (potable) water and use that to really scrub the dishes. We generally use the same water for the whole meal’s dishes so the first dishes get nice and clean while the last dishes not so much. The third step is to sanitize the dishes by dipping them in potable water to which a bit of bleach has been added. Dishes which have been dipped in lake water, washed with dirty wash water and then been given a coating of bleach may not meet everyone’s idea of “clean”, but we’ve generally stayed healthy on our trips, so it must work! In any case, the cook doesn’t clean so I was happy not to have dish duty.

This is what dish duty looks like

I don’t remember whether it was Wednesday or not, but the critters on the island started attacking our stuff big time. One night Suzanne’s dry bag of food was gnawed through while hung from a tree. The next, Rob’s Platypus bottle of Manhattans was gnawed into. Perhaps it was foolish to have left the bottle out on the picnic table overnight, but we got a kick imaging the drunk chipmunks who drank Rob’s Manhattans. The darn critters even chewed through the shower hose, which was totally inexplicable because in no way was that associated with the smell or taste of food. Maybe it was the drunk ones who did it.

Another 12 mile day.

There are too many pretty sunset pictures to post

Thursday

This was a great weather day. We awoke to find the lake like glass, quite the change from the heavy chop of a few days earlier. The smooth conditions made this the perfect day for some more open water, so we decided to head east and do the crossing to North Hero Island. As seemed to be the case every day, conditions kicked up a little bit as we got onto the water and so we had some chop as we covered the three miles across to a protected bay at the southwest corner of South Hero Island Along the way we passed a rock known as Carleton’s Prize. Apparently, in a dense fog during the Revolutionary War battle referenced earlier, British commander saw what he thought was an American ship and had his ships pound it with cannon fire for some time before realizing that it was just a rock protruding from the water. There is some local lore that the Americans had hoisted logs on the island to look like masts in an intentional act of deception, but it may just have been that General Carleton was clueless – certainly it might have occurred to him sooner to question why the ship was neither returning fire nor fleeing.

Playing with trucks at White's Beach

Jen, Tom and Suzanne at White's Beach

We landed at White’s Beach (one of the places pointed out to me in my pre-trip conversation with a local paddler) for a lunch break. We chatted with a local retired couple who were sitting in lawn chairs enjoying the view of the bay on a splendid day. They insisted that we go see the dinosaurs. Despite always keeping an eye out for Champ, the lake’s answer to the Loch Ness monster, we hadn’t seen any dinosaurs on our way in, but we had noticed a large number of brightly colored birdhouses dotting the shoreline. Like a zillion of them. It turns out that a local resident is a prolific birdhouse builder and, according to Atlas Obscura, the birdhouses have a purpose – to attract swallows which in turn gobble up the otherwise troublesome mosquito population. Apparently the birdhouse guy is something of a character, since in addition to creating the birdhouse forest he has dotted it with large scale replicas of dinosaurs. We got a kick out of it.

Part of the birdhouse forest - with dinosaurs

There’s a skinny 3 mile long causeway connecting South Hero to mainland Vermont – almost. The causeway was built as a railway around the turn of the 20^th century, but railway service was discontinued in the 1960’s and the causeway has since been converted to a bike trail. Alas, a chunk of the causeway collapsed at some point in the past and so it no longer completely connects South Hero and the mainland. I understand there’s a tiny ferry that runs people across the 200 ft. gap in the high season – it wasn’t running when we were there. While a dead end for runners and cyclists, the opening in the causeway is a great boon to boaters who would otherwise have to go all the way around South Hero Island (upwards of 25 miles) to get into Mallett’s Bay and its environs. We paddled down the causeway and through the gap, took a peek in the direction of Camp Skyland, a commercial campsite we had considered as a backup location, then turned around and headed back to camp.

Paddling through the causeway gap

On the way back my left trapezius muscle started to painfully spasm and so the haul back to camp seemed longer than it was. I pride myself on not being particularly achy (I have written before about being the sole abstainer in the daily ibuprofen feast that is the norm for these trips) but today was an exception. Upon returning to camp my first act was to was to wash down a couple of Alleve with a shot of bourbon, which helped somewhat.

It was a warm, sunny afternoon and so we all took dips in the lake followed by showers (separately!). I have a rather 19^th century level of modesty (certainly in comparison with my male companions) and so I did what for me was a rarity – took off my shirt and lay down on the warm stone along the shoreline of our cove. The warm rock and the sun further helped my shoulder.

In the later afternoon two kayakers, Shawn and Karen, paddled into the cove to chat. Since they weren’t power boaters and weren’t looking to make camp we didn’t run them off. Rather, we chatted. Strangely, while the Burlington side of the lake has an active kayaking community, they said they were among the few kayakers on the Plattsburgh side of the lake. Jen was quite interested in talking with them – she lives less than two hours away, which counts as close by in these parts, and so was happy to meet some other “nearby” paddlers. They said they would leave their contact info on Jen’s windshield back at Peru Dock. I should mention that in talking about choosing kayaks it came up that Shawn was 6’ 8” tall, and so he and Tom got to commiserate about how hard it is for the big guys to find kayaks that fit them. I should also mention that kayaking is a very small sport – we all knew people in common from the kayaking world, and not just celebrity kayakers like Dubside.

Back in camp it was Tom’s turn for dinner: massuman curry (based on those little cans of curry seasoning from the Asian market), naan, canned hummus (in case you’re keeping score, that makes three types of hummus – Jen’s dehydrated real stuff, my instant hummus kit, and Tom’s canned stuff), and the crème de la crème, Cheese Whiz (no refrigeration necessary!) and crackers. I thought I was going to be the junk food king on the trip for having brought the organic version of Pringles to accompany my dinner, but Tom’s Cheese Whiz and (later) Rob’s Twinkies took the prize.

Another 12 mile day.

Lake Champlain Part 1: Pre-trip to Plattsburgh

Pre-trip

Every trip starts with a trip to get to the trip. Sometimes we travel together, but this time each and every one of us drove separately. I was held up at work and so my journey started a little later than planned which led to me having to slog through afternoon rush hour. I covered only 50 miles in my first two hours of driving – ugh. Eventually the road opened up and I cruised through the forgettable landscape of central Pennsylvania. I had hoped to make it to New Paltz, the site of many fond if fuzzy memories from years ago, but given the traffic delays I made it only as far as Scranton, which left me five hours of driving to do on Friday. I got an early start and had no problem making it to my planned rendezvous with Jen (describing it that way sounds more suspicious than it was) on Friday at Peru Dock on the New York side of the lake. The plan had been that we’d leave my car at Peru Dock and another car at Kamp Kill Kare in Vermont so that in case of bad weather (which we’d heard was a significant possibility on Lake Champlain) we would always be near a car.

Notice that past perfect progressive tense in the last sentence? There’s a famous quote that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.* Well, no kayaking plan survives very long past the beginning of the trip. While Jen and I were dropping a car at Peru Dock Rob and Tom met up to deposit a car at Kill Kare. They called the park office to inform them that they were going to leave a car there for a few days and, despite our having checked it all out in advance, were informed  it wasn’t appropriate for them to leave a car at Kill Kare since the islands on which we planned to camp were closed! Apparently, it had something to do with letting the islands’ ecology have a break after camping season. This was pretty perplexing – the web site for the park didn’t mention this closure and neither had anyone we had spoken with on the phone. We half suspected that the information we were getting was coming from someone at headquarters who wasn’t really in touch with what was going on.

Rob and Tom started investigating alternatives. One option was car camping at Grand Isle State Park. As it happened, Jen and I had to pass by this park on our way to Burlington and so we stopped in to check it out. The employee we chatted with at the park was worn out from the season – cynical, a little punchy, and ready to be done with the season’s tourists, but she did give us a key nugget of information, which was that it was possible to launch at the privately owned Hero’s Welcome store on North Hero Island, from which it was an easy paddle across to Kn1t3 Island (note - Kn1t3 is not the real name of the island - I have obscured the name to protect the guilty).

Out and About in Burlington

All of us met up at our Burlington AirBnB, which had the feel of low budget off campus housing (clean, but low budget). After settling in we headed out to Foam Brewery, recommended by my craft brew obsessed neighbor Steve C. Foam turned out to be an excellent recommendation – interesting brews, an in-house magician who circulated among the tables doing impressive card tricks, a great view of the lake, and friendly customers (we got an overview of the Revolutionary War history of the lake from the history teacher at the next table). Rob had made a dinner reservation for us at Hen of the Wood, an upscale restaurant which was conveniently just a few blocks from Foam. Hen of the Wood is a Burlington kind of restaurant – locavore, sustainable, organic, blah, blah, blah. The web site has an image of a guy hauling a freshly killed deer on the back rack of his mountain bike. I guess the goal is to have fresh local venison while maintaining a low carbon footprint. Anyway, the meal was fabulous. I had halibut. Other entrees included beet pappardelle and rabbit. This was shaping up to be my kind of camping! We skipped the desserts at Hen in favor of walking over to Ben & Jerry’s** for ice cream. Along the way we got distracted by a large outdoor store – we browsed, but our wallets survived largely intact.

The group enjoying a drink at Foam

Foam's staff magician shows his stuff

Not the Ur Ben & Jerry's, but close enough

Over dinner we agreed on a nefarious plan - that we were going to launch at Hero’s Welcome and sneak our way onto Kn1t3 Island. If we got kicked off, we’d deal. If we didn’t we would have the place to ourselves!

*This quote is often misattributed to Nazi Field Marshal Rommel but it was Prussian General Helmuth von Moltke the Elder who said it. I don’t sprinkle my writing with Rommel quotes, OK?

**I had thought that this was the first Ben & Jerry’s, but it turns out the original shop was a couple of blocks away in a building which has since been torn down. Close enough.

Part II: Kn1t3Island

Saturday

The day started off in a leisurely fashion. We strolled through the remnants of a street festival down to Handy’s, an old-fashioned (founded 1945) lunch counter sort of place. The crowd at the U-shaped counter was a mix of college students, artsy types, and general locals. From there we went to the supermarket (Jen and I had shopped there the day before but others still needed some things) and made another outdoor store detour – this time to the Sierra Trading Post across from the supermarket. Sierra Trading Post is a well-known online discounter of outdoor gear and we just couldn’t resist peeking inside – particularly one of our group, who we joke has platinum status there.

Lake Champlain has its own Loch Ness monster, named Champ

Alas, all of us including our Sierra Trading Post super shopper were underwhelmed by what was available at the store – STP has gone downhill as a bargain-hunter’s paradise since their acquisition by TJ MAXX. Having fulfilled our shopping needs we continued on to Hero’s Welcome.

Hero’s Welcome is a popular stopping point for both cyclists and boater and so the place was hopping. They were game to let us park there for a few days and made no mention of any restrictions on camping on Kn1t3 Island. As expected, they’re not park rangers and so really didn’t care what we were up to as long as we paid our parking and launch fees. I will mention that we had an interesting role reversal going on within our group dynamics. Usually Tom is the rule-breaker among us, Suzanne and I are the cautious ones, with Rob and Jen wisely staying on the sidelines while Tom, Suzanne and I argue things out. This time, though, for whatever reason it was Tom who was worried while Suzanne and I were the ones wanting to go for it.

Getting ready at Hero's Welcome

Packing the boats for the first time on a trip always takes a long time and it was 2 PM by the time we set out on the short, choppy paddle to Kn1t3Island. It’s always something of a shock to paddle a loaded kayak, as the boats feel really different loaded – hard to get and keep moving, but super stable. We chose a campsite on the east side of the island, as far from civilization and the ranger station (!) as we could get. The rest of the day was spent setting up camp. The Kn1t3 Island campsites were quite nice. Ours had a clean outhouse, and a lean-to shelter with a picnic table in it. The two nights we spent on Kn1t3 Island were chilly (lows in the 40’s) and breezy, so having the shelter was great in that it helped us stay warm while we ate and hung out. Dinner was Jen’s excellent polenta with goat cheese, spinach, almonds and raisins, accompanied by and followed by consumption of wine.

Hanging out in the lean-to on Kn1t3 Island

Kn1t3 Island "Ironwood" campsite

That whole first evening we continued to work ourselves into a lather figuring that a platoon of park rangers was going to swarm our campsite at any second. 

After a long day we retired to our tents. My major gear acquisition for the trip was a down sleeping bag, which was able to be compressed down into a really small size but which kept me nice and warm, even on those coldest nights.

Sunday

Each member of the group contributes some set of special skills, kind of like The A-Team. Rob and Tom are our experts at purifying water – their fancy gravity feed water purification system easily satisfies our water needs. One of my specialties (besides being exceptionally charming) is in route and map planning. While I am not formally trained in map reading, I always scrutinize the charts and Google maps to get a feel for where we’ll be traveling and camping. I also scope out places to explore and send out a set of GPS waypoints for key locations to everyone in advance of the trip. As part of my research prior to this trip I had gotten in touch with a member of the local Lake Champlain Kayak Meetup, who had mentioned several things to me, including that there was a “sometimes navigable” culvert under a road that allowed you to cut across a narrow part of North Hero Island and access protected paddling on Carry Bay on the west side of the island.

We awoke to continued breezy weather and choppy conditions, so we decided to go in search of the Carry Bay cut-through to find some non-choppy water for our day’s outing. Needless to say, I had calculated a waypoint for where I thought the culvert might be based on my examination of the satellite imagery, and it was pretty spot-on. What we found when we got there was a roughly eight-foot diameter by eighty foot long pipe passing under a road. The problem was, we couldn’t exactly paddle through it. What we didn’t know yet was that due to drought conditions the lake was about five feet below its normal level. As a result, the pipe was above the water line. After some consultation we decided to go for it and carried the kayaks up the slope into the pipe. The pipe had a few feet of standing water in it and so we easily floated the boats from one end to the other and then we carried them down a slope into the bay. It was daunting when we first saw it, but pretty easy in execution.

In the culvert

Passing boats into the culvert

And it was worth it. Carry Bay is quite protected from the weather and so once through the culvert we were treated to smooth, nearly windless paddling through the bay and up a channel between North Hero and a peninsula. We had thought we might paddle a loop - go all the way around the top of North Hero, but at our lunch break we decided it was too far (would have been a total of 20ish miles) and so we turned around and did the whole culvert thing again back home. We were relieved upon our return to camp not to find any angry rangers or eviction notices.

Sunset on Kn1t3 Island

The scheduling of this year’s trip presented something of a conundrum to me since the major Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashonah fell during the week of the trip. Only once before have I been away for one of the Jewish high holidays (Yom Kippur in Korea!), but I decided I would go for it. In advance of the trip I downloaded a מחזור (holiday prayer book) onto my phone and I figured I would skip paddling on Monday. Sunday late afternoon I settled into the lean-to to read through the evening service, but I was tired from paddling and started to doze off (which is not atypical for Rosh Hashonah services!) and so went to my tent and took a quick nap. After dinner (packaged Trader Joe’s Indian dal curry over farro) while the rest of the group chatted I sat in the back of the lean-to and read through the rest of the service. 

Monday

Remember that part about my not kayaking on Rosh Hashonah? Well, it didn’t exactly work out that way. Because we were (maybe) breaking the rules by camping on the forbidden island we figured we better not risk more than two nights there. Plus, the forecast called for a cold, rainy period from mid-day Monday to mid-day Tuesday, including really rough water. Camping in the rain stinks. Setting up camp in the rain is worse. Spendign the rest of the week with wet gear would have been really bad. We’re in this for the vacation, not as some sort of Spartan endurance test, so we decided we would skip the 24 hour rainstorm by spending Monday night ashore. Using the miracle known as the Internet Tom booked us a couple of rooms at the Plattsburgh, NY Fairfield Inn. We broke camp (on Rosh Hashonah), kayaked back to Hero’s Welcome (through beaming waves which had already built to 2+ feet, on Rosh Hashonah), and drove to Plattsburgh to the hotel (still Rosh Hashonah). So yeah, I didn’t exactly do that “not kayaking on Rosh Hashonah” thing. I didn’t skip the holiday entirely though – in addition to reading through the service Sunday evening I managed to sneak in performing the Tashlickh ritual while we were unloading at Hero’s Welcome.

I look pretty happy for someone who is going to burn in Hell for kayaking on Rosh Hashonah (wait, we don't exactly believe in Hell ...)

We ate lunch at Anthony’s, an Italian restaurant in Plattsburgh recommended by a woman we spoke with while unloading at Hero’s Welcome. From the name I was expecting a third-rate red sauce Italian place but it turned out to be quite excellent and not strictly southern Italian. Since we had gone straight from Hero’s Welcome to the restaurant we were way too bedraggled lookiong for what turned out to be an upscale kind of place, but we pretended we looked decent. I ordered pastrami-seasoned smoked salmon on a baguette with horseradish aioli, but exercised a little self-control and eschewed the desserts - though everyone else indulged. Bourbon pecan pie. House-made carrot cake ice cream, etc. Yum!

At the hotel we got adjoining rooms and spent the evening sorting and repacking gear (it seems like much of the time on these trips is spent unpacking, packing and schlepping). Rob, Tom and I shared a room. Since I had gotten the best bed at the AirBNB back in Burlington I was consigned to the worst one in Plattsburgh: a wheel-in cot, a throwback to the vacations of my youth where as the youngest I always got the crappiest sleeping arrangements. No matter – after a couple of nights on my camping cot, the hotel cot felt like heaven.

Oh, I forgot to mention – after a perusal of the Yelp! Reviews for Plattsburgh restaurants (during which we somehow decided that Duck Biscuits would be a great band name), we had dinner at a Greek place downtown. Food was OK, but no match for Anthony’s.