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.