Selected articles from the Spring 2003 issue

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KAYAKING THE EDISTO RIVER IN SOUTH CAROLINA

Keith Rodgers

      We have driven down the monotonous stretch of the I-95 south of Richmond, Virginia. Miles of straight blacktop, except when it’s silver grey concrete streaked with long black rubber skid marks that end with no explanation, not even a shard of glass. It was late in April when we came south, and by mid-morning it was already hot on the Carolina coastal plain. Large billboards pushing fireworks and towel outlets flicked by. The carcasses of dead truck tires lay in twists on the highway’s shoulder, mile after mile. Like the rest of the endless traffic we ran along at a respectable 10 mph above the limit. From time to time I checked breaks in the roadside tree cover for the cars of lurking state troopers or glanced up through the windshield at the rope securing the prow of the kayak on the car roof. For over 800 miles neither gave us any trouble.

      As predictable as the movement of a caribou herd or a flock of geese, the annual spring migration of Canadians sends a flood of Ontario and Quebec license plates southward down the interstates, most of them turning off for the sand and motel strips of Nag’s Head or Myrtle Beach. But for us it’s mid afternoon of the second day of driving before we turn east onto the I-26, towards the Charleston peninsula, the clean Atlantic and the chain of barrier islands that stretch southwards through Georgia.

      I have been visiting this part of the world for almost twenty years now. For the first few years I hauled my canoe along, but the almost constant south-westerly wind blowing up the estuaries and the swells and surf of the ocean saw the canoe sitting neglected on the shore most of the time. My discovery of sea kayaking changed all that. Now I come down to meet friends and polish skills for three days at the East Coast Canoe and Kayak Symposium in Charleston. The Symposium over, it’s a family vacation with day trips through the creeks and marshland which line the coast or a paddle through a tidal inlet lined with dunes out into the warm surf breaking on the sand bars at the inlet’s mouth. By the third week in April the water temperature in Charleston harbour has reached almost seventy degrees, and it will continue to climb steadily to its summer maximum in the mid eighties.

      But on this particular hot morning we have come a few miles inland, to paddle on the Edisto, one of the larger of the many black-water rivers that come out of the mountains of West Virginia and North Carolina to meander across the coastal plain to the sea. We pull into a small park at the West Bank public boat landing near Parker’s Ferry. The ferry was replaced years ago by the predecessor of the bridge that today carries Highway 17 on its way south from Charleston to Savannah. The parking area is in deep shade, overhung with huge live oaks, their branches strung with silvery-grey Spanish moss. We are about 8 miles north of the thick blue line on my map showing the change of the river water from salt to fresh. It’s pretty much an arbitrary line, as the transition zone itself is always shifting, moving up and down the river as the tides flood in and out, always pushing against the outward stream of the cold fresh water coming from the hills. Here at Parker’s Ferry the tea-coloured river is about 150 yards wide with a slow current, but it’s still tidal. I taste the water, expecting to find it brackish, but it’s sweet. What’s happening is that the fresh water is flowing slowly over the top of the incoming tidal flood of seawater. This tendency of the river water to float in a layer on top of the denser salt water means the incoming tide hoists up millions of gallons of fresh water twice a day. Build dikes and sluices along the muddy banks, open and shut the sluice gates at just the right times and in the fields behind the dikes water-loving crops can flourish. In the 17th and 18th centuries just such an engineering feat was accomplished by the terrible labours of the slaves. In the waterlogged fields they planted indigo, an unremarkable looking plant that when harvested and fermented in vats yielded a marvellous violet-blue dye. But when garishly coloured chemical dyes came along early in Victoria’s reign, fashionable women in England and America abandoned the softer vegetable hues. So the planters switched to rice, and flourished until the twin disasters of the Civil War and the growth of Asian competition finished them off.

      Today almost nothing remains of the sluices and earthworks along the Edisto, but along the Ashley and Cooper rivers, just upstream from Charleston, visitors to the few surviving, splendid, plantation houses can look at the embanked rice fields and restored sluices and wonder at the ingenuity, and back-breaking work, that made the city one of the largest and wealthiest in eighteenth-century America.

      Others welcomed the reluctance of the fresh water to blend with the salty tide, well before the planters came. The alligator, unlike the crocodile, avoids salt water, and by carefully swimming in the freshwater layer is able to extend his range downstream. Someone had told us that they were plentiful for a few miles south of Parker’s Ferry, and, in the same helpful spirit, had pointed out that the warm spring weather would encourage their boisterous mating behaviour.

      It’s low tide but on the turn as we put into the river and paddle out of the shade into hot, hazy sunlight and across to the far side. An osprey flies overhead and a bald eagle sits in a tall but dead cypress, looking as if it were posing for a coin or medallion. This would be an impressive start for a bird watcher, but my paddling companion, my 23 year-old daughter, has alligators on her mind and she is excited and scared in about equal measure. Almost immediately we come across a four-foot long specimen lying on the exposed muddy bank. At this size he is a cousin to the animals we have been seeing most days lurking around the water hazards on the golf courses on Kiawah Island and so is no cause for alarm. As I reach for the catch on the camera case strapped ahead of the cockpit I notice, about twenty feet ahead of us on the bank, a much, much bigger alligator rising up on his forelegs, a large pouch of skin hanging at his chest, and his mouth partly open. Later Emma will describe him as being as long as her kayak; I estimate twelve feet, short for a kayak but still very impressive for an alligator when you meet him on his own territory. I remind myself that his mouth is open for ventilation, and that he is heading our way because we are in the water, which is where he also wants to be. I ask Emma to paddle ahead so I can get her in the picture and so give a sense of scale; she disappoints me by simply looking at me in astonishment. The click of my camera case sends the alligator slithering on his belly into the water, and my shot catches a long tail on the bank and a head and snout about six feet out in the river; he slips in fully and sinks out of sight without a sound or a bubble. We see three more alligators on the bank, all modest in size, before we turn into a narrow creek that winds through a dense jungle of reeds and broad-leaved plants with saucer-sized white flowers armed with pointy-tipped spikes that look designed to catch small birds.

      The incoming tide moves us rapidly upstream in about ten inches of water. The sand and mud banks extend five feet above our heads; across them hundreds of scurrying fiddler crabs scramble into their holes as we glide past. In the trench of the creek the heat presses down on us. We hear sustained loud crashing noises in the dense reed cover to our right. Whatever it is, it’s large and completely unconcerned about giving its presence away. We can’t see it, but expect that at any moment something will burst into sight above us on the bank; this is more alarming than the big alligator. We manoeuvre around a corner and come to a stop. A log lies across the creek bottom, on the far side of which a small green aluminum punt has come to rest. An elderly man sits on the seat, flicking a fishing line ahead of him,

      "Hogs," he says "wild hogs. Got across this log coupla hours ago but now I gotta wait for a little more tide before I kin git back."

      We chat about the fishing. He was hoping for red spot, a local variety of bass, but has seen only catfish, which he holds in contempt. I mention the alligators,

      "Won’t hurt you if you leaves ’em alone," he says and turns back to his fishing. We turn around with difficulty and paddle back into the main current. Now the mud banks have vanished beneath the tide, and the alligators with them. On the far side of the river is a pretty cabin, covered with cedar clapboard. Down at the water’s edge the owner has built a small dock with a children’s slide at one end; presumably he shares the old fisherman’s view that the local alligators are no threat.

      The river current is still slipping over the top of the incoming tide as we paddle with it downstream. On the riverbanks we see elegant Louisiana herons, thin as runway models. So as not to startle them we move out into the middle of the wide river. On shore the cedars and cypresses are thinning as the Edisto flows through the Snuggedy swamp, which is not as cozy as its name. Prairies of spartina grass start to appear, dotted with hammocks of dry land covered with tall loblolly pines and edged with fringes of bayberry bushes. We are now in the ACE Basin nature reserve.

      The reserve takes its name from the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto rivers, whose mouths and wetlands it encompasses. Covering 350,000 acres, it’s home to 265 species of birds, including the wood stork (no sign of them today), and white ibis, clapper rails and brown pelicans; we see lots of these, and a few more whose names escape me. Set up in 1990, the ACE basin might have been designed with sea kayakers in mind; it wasn’t, but it’s hard to imagine a better way of seeing this vast area of salt marsh, tidal inlets and miles of almost-deserted beaches. We turn up into another side creek, the water flooding in is now about five feet deep and rising rapidly up the brown muddy banks. We manoeuvre around a bend and the bank turns to clean sand as the creek cuts alongside a hammock of dry land covered with a thick entanglement of sea myrtle and bayberry, out of which stick some slash pines and a palmetto. The creek narrows down so that our paddle blades are almost brushing the banks on either side. We back out until we reach the mouth of a smaller tributary, which we hadn’t even noticed as we came in. It allows us to turn around. It’s easy to get lost in a big salt marsh, and it can be a messy business scrambling up to the top of a bank, sinking into the mud as you try to catch sight or sound of the sea, which in this marsh will tell you which way is west. Today, I have a compass fastened on the boat.

      The sides and bottoms of these channels are everywhere made of the rich, glutinous mud, which Carolinians call pluff. Get the tide wrong and you may be forced to wade in it, dragging your kayak behind you. You’ll find the top few inches are the colour and texture of dark chocolate pudding. A little further down and the texture thickens to cheesecake; at about a foot it turns to toffee and stays that way for another two feet or so until you hit bottom. Stretchy mesh nylon beach shoes or river sandals with worn Velcro fasteners are easily claimed by the mud as you haul your feet up against the suction. If you are not squeamish, bare feet are fine – the mud is full of life but nothing alive in it is likely to hurt you. The dead stuff is another matter – old oyster shells, spiky cordgrass stems and splintered whelk shells can scratch, cut or even prompt brief irrational thoughts of large, bad-tempered crabs. My solution is to go carefully barefoot or wear cheap, laced canvas shoes, the kind you can throw in a washing machine.

      The temperature now feels in the high 80s, unseasonably warm as we follow the west bank down to the public landing at Willstown Bluffs. We’ve come about five miles south of the I-17 and are not far from the sea. Here the riverbank is a small sand beach edged by a low bluff, cut through by a sunken dirt road were the car is waiting. Our bows nudge softly into the sand, we climb out and splash in the warm water. The river is now entirely salt, and I think we hear the sound of surf in the distance.

      With the kayaks strapped on, we drive back towards the highway. Spring growth has almost covered the beer cans, torn plastic bags and decaying cardboard cartons that still festoon the sides of many roads throughout the South. The problem is bad in South Carolina, but rises to a crescendo of mindlessness in Georgia where even the yaupon holly and greenbriar bushes that edge the beaches on the National Wildlife Refuges rise out of a mulch of bags and cans. You learn to ignore it; which of course is part of the problem.

      Today, there are quail scurrying in the grass and we see a small group of deer standing in the shade of some live oaks at the edge of a field that’s covered with a green fuzz of some crop I don’t recognize. The live oaks are draped with Spanish moss, just like in the pictures. We turn onto the highway and join the stream of traffic slipping along to Charleston at a reasonable pace above the legal limit.

RESOURCES:

Map:
Coastal Expeditions publishes an excellent, large-scale map of South Carolina showing public boat landings and canoe and kayak put-ins. Contact Coastal Expeditions, P.O. Box 556, Sullivan’s Island S.C. 29482 U.S.A. or www.coastalexpeditions.com.

Books:
Sea Kayaking the Carolinas, James Bannon & Morrison Giffen, Asheville, NC: Out There Press, 1997.
Tideland Treasure, Todd Ballantyne, Hilton Head, SC: Deerfield Publishing, 19991.

TALES OF THE RIDEAU

Paula Huber

      June 1, 2002, the wind howled sending strong gusts slashing the waters of Mooney's Bay, Rideau River. My heart thumped as my husband gave me a shove and I slid across the choppy water in my 12-ft. Sun Flight kayak. My Rideau Canal journey had begun, an 11-day paddle from Hog’s Back lock station, Ottawa, to Portsmouth Marina, Kingston, a distance of 190 kilometres.

      A visit to my daughter, who attends Kemptville College, a few months before had planted the seeds of this adventure. We had a picnic lunch at Burritt’s Rapids lock station. One look at the serene surroundings and the still, flat waters of the canal beckoned me to paddle the system.

      The historic Rideau Waterway is a national treasure. After the War of 1812 the threat of an American invasion necessitated the construction of an inland water route to Kingston to avoid attack on the St. Lawrence River. Colonel By and his Royal Engineers constructed the canal system (1826-1832), to allow British gunboats and supply safe passage from Montreal, through the interior, to Kingston. Today much of the system is tranquil and pastoral, while other parts encompass modern cities and cottage settlements. Two publications were used to plan and research my trip: Rideau Waterway, by Robert Legget and Rideau Boating and Road Guide, a Parks Canada Publication.

      My kayak had been purchased a year previous to this trip. Always one to seek out adventure I was looking for an activity to keep myself fit and enjoy the wilds of the outdoors on a solo basis. A sea kayak would satisfy my need to be on the water, explore nature, and provide plenty of exercise. Two Canadian companies, Sun Kayak, and Simon River Sports had well-built, durable products that fit my small body frame. The Flight is a plastic, bombproof compact (12’ 6"), light (39 pounds) kayak which fits inside my van. The SRS paddles are short in length, durable and extremely light weight. I took to the sport immediately, spending many hours paddling on Lake Ontario (Toronto area) and Lake Erie (Long Point Bay area). The kayak performed so well in big lake waters that I was soon thinking of a one to two week solo expedition.

      A bit of customizing, trimming the seat back lower, adding extra knee/thigh padding, and neoprene gasket seals around the hatches and the boat was ready. Being fit for my age, having many years experience boating/diving the Great Lakes and various oceans and a love of wilderness camping and adventures meant I was prepared. The challenge was loading and paddling the kayak for an 11-day journey. I am a light packer and have been known to wear the same clothing day after day for up to 3 weeks on wilderness adventures. Clothing was a non-issue, the challenge was food, camping, cooking and safety equipment.

      The first step was to bring the kayak into my living room and make 3 piles of the gear (light, heavy, very heavy) that I was planning to take with me. I learned very quickly that small, elongated bags work best. After numerous packing attempts and much elimination of "stuff" I had the kayak packed so that it would paddle on trim. Never having paddled with a full boat I had no idea what the performance would be on the water. In the end, my many years of boating experience paid off and I had a fully stuffed kayak that handled well, glided smoothly and was stable. My objective was to have everything inside the kayak except compass, spare paddle, paddle float, map case etc. Not a hope! My clothes were triple bagged and tied on top of the kayak immediately behind me. A tip over and I was prepared to cut the tethers of the bag so I had a chance of righting the boat. The bag did provide a nice soft backrest when I was lazy paddling.

      Food, now there was a challenge. I am a meat eater who likes real food not bulgar, couscous etc. There was the problem. In future I will test cook and eat every meal before trips. I have plans to dehydrate my own meal creations for my next adventure. A better mix of food groups next time will satisfy my hunger. (Oatmeal just doesn’t provide enough lasting energy per gram consumed.)

      I used the Parks Canada book as my navigation/information guide. Basic navigation skills and common sense were all that was needed to find my way. The system is well marked with channel markers even in the larger bodies of water. A one way Transit Lockage Permit and a small camping fee at the lock stations was reasonably priced. Most of the locks are still hand operated. For most of the trip I was the only one locking through at the stations. The lock staff were pleasant and friendly, always willing to operate the locks just for me in my 12-ft. kayak. Camping is allowed at all lock stations. Drinking water and flush toilets are added luxuries.

      Daily paddles were gauged according to distances between lock stations and closing times of the stations. During the week 4:30 p.m. was last lock through and 7:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. I tried to lock through and camp on the downside so I could leave anytime the next morning and not have to wait for the lockmaster to arrive at 8:30 a.m. A key to the washroom was also available if I arrived before closing. Paddle days ranged from 6 to 35 kilometres. The direction of paddling was from Ottawa to Kingston, due to the convenience of leaving my van parked at Portsmouth Marina, Kingston.

      I am not a "zoom down the water, how many miles can I do in a day" person. I have too much self-confidence for that nonsense. I was prepared to abort the trip and try again another time it I found it too physically challenging, had boat problems or became injured. I enjoy the outdoors and solo travelling. The serenity of travelling solo with no distance or time constraints made the trip enjoyable and fun. Some days were difficult paddles (wind, very hot temperatures) where self-discipline ticked off the kilometres using technical, mechanical strokes. Other days, gusty winds accompanied by driving rain produced a soaked, exhilarated paddler who shouted for joy at being alive and able to experience the situation. Being alone gave me the freedom to control my day.

      Many times I lounged and savoured the moment. It is more difficult alone, because I was tied, hungry, and sometimes wet and cold at the end of the day. It was I who had to pitch camp, prepare food, clean up and pack the kayak for the night. A sense of pride and accomplishment definitely is the result of all the effort. One can discover one’s true self when physically challenged. If you give up you don’t proceed. Whining won’t help; there is no one to hear it. Self-confidence and physical and mental fitness are the result of reaching limits.

      Whenever I became overwhelmed, too hot or too tired I landed and stopped. I ate, drank and lots of times took a dip in the water to cool off body and mind. Then I would sit awhile to savour the experience, and feeling of freedom and accomplishment. It didn’t matter if I finished the route, paddled 6 or 35 kilometres in a day. What was important was how I felt about what I was doing. I did this for me; Ellesmere Island here I come.

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