| [Home] [Adventures] [Free Advice] [Links] |
| [Home] [Adventures] [Free Advice] [Links] |
A Canoe Trip Through Mid-Coast Maine by Matt Hopkinson
The Coastal RouteWhat the heck is a Wawenock? The Wawenock Tribe of the Abenaki Nation once occupied the coastal area of Maine between the Kennebec River and Penobscot Bay. They traveled by birch bark canoe as they followed the seasonal abundance of fish and game as well as for trading and warfare. Even though there is evidence that they ventured out to sea for fishing, their standard canoes were best suited to protected inland waters, and they developed a network of routes that took advantage of protected passages as they traveled the coastline. Since the Mid Coast of Maine has many long narrow necks protruding far out into rough ocean waters, it was often convenient to carry the canoes overland from one protected waterway to the next. In the Abenaki tongue, “wangan” refers to the stuff one carries, such as paddles, clothes and food. “Ahwangan” refers to the act of carrying or the actual trail that one follows while carrying. So the word “ahwangan” is Abenaki for “portage”.This is a report of the route along the coast from Penobscot Bay across nine ahwangans to Cousins Island in Casco Bay. We only made it to Bath, on the Kennebec, but had a few adventures along the way. We traveled by canoe, employing the arts of paddling, poling, portaging, and even sailing as we attempted 160 miles in ten days. We each paddled our own 16’ canoes, outfitted with home-made sail rigs and laden with folding boat carts, camping gear and food for a week. This trip is a logical continuation of both a 400 mile trip from the St. Lawrence Seaway done in 2000 and a crossing of the Maliseet Trail completed in 2005. The Maliseet Trail follows a 10,000 year-old canoe route from the Fredericton area of the St. John River west to the Penobscot River. The reader really ought to have a copy of the Delorme Atlas of Maine spread open, to help follow our route.
My Journal: St. George River by way of the Passagassawakeag.My friends call me Hal. They call this weather Hal-weather. Despite the forecast for a partly sunny day, we are enjoying heavy, sodden rain, fog, lightning and thunder. Thunder! We have declared Day 1 as a wind day, due mostly to the lightning. Otherwise, we’d begin. Hopefully, tomorrow will not bring too much clearing wind, as we’ll have a lot of open water between here and Belfast.
Ooniganissek. The Ooniganissek is the first ahwangan one encounters after enjoying the salmon pool in Veazie. We spent the night in Veazie on 2000 on our way down from the St. Lawrence, at a public campground. The campground was built in an area that would have been suitable in ages past for just such a stop, though we were portaging around the Veazie Dam and not Wabenobahntik (White water falls). Anyway, 30 miles of easy paddling below “the big salmon pool” brings one to the Ooniganissek. According to historians, this means “short carry”, as Winnegansis means “little carry” and Merriconeag means “quick carrying place”. I’ll never figure out the Abenaki tongue. Nowadays, there is a grassy boat ramp on private property that takes one to the road. One would need to get permission before using this. Heading south on the road takes one to Mill Pond, where a canoe can be launched, preferably at high tide. Mill Pond opens into a shallow protected bay. The route used to pass between Sears Island and mainland before the state built a causeway out to the island. Now it’s a short carry over the causeway. The island was known to the Wawenocks as Wasumkeag, which means “shining sands” and was a popular camping spot. There is some discussion about how to treat Sears Island now, whether to preserve it as open space or to develop it as a shipping terminal. More information can be found at maine.sierraclub.org/sears_island.htm.
A short distance down the shoreline of Penobscot Bay is a private campground named Searsport Ocean Shores. We started from there on July 1, sailing under a nice stiff breeze. We headed out on a tack, aimed at what I take to be Camden way down the shoreline. After sailing a mile or so, I looked at the shoreline, quite far away and decided to come about and tack the other direction for a while. This was my first sailing lesson of the trip; even though the waves were coming up the bay, the wind was coming from somewhere to the right of that. The performance of our home-made rigs and our skills being what they were, our tack brought us back toward shore maybe 100 yards upwind of where we started. At this rate, we’d be sailing all day and into the night before we made Belfast. So it was time to drop the sails and get out the paddle for a slog into the headwind. No bugs, at least. I lean into my paddle; every moment in the wind is lost progress. While paddling, forward progress is slow; to stop paddling is to see an hour’s forward progress lost every minute. I look ahead and see Tommy, whose sail rig seems better equipped to sail into the wind, turn and sail back to me to see what’s up. That was his undoing, as he seemed to catch the sailing virus and could no longer make headway.
The PassagassawakeagWe had a choice to make. We could do the obvious route and sail the 30 miles down Penobscot Bay, past Camden to Rockland and portage over to Thomaston, or we could ascend the Passagassawakeag, cross the height of land and descend the St. George River to Thomaston. We chose the latter. Had we chosen the former, we would have had a chance to explore Mecadacut/Magwintegwak routes to Megunticook Lake and inland to the St. George. link to map
We made Belfast around lunchtime. Sean and Tom shuttled vehicles around so that everything was parked in the free lot in town. Nice place, this Belfast. The headwind seemed to have swung around to come straight out of the river as we ascended. We ran up with the incoming tide, which helped, and reached Head of Tide at about high tide. As we ascended, the gravelly river bottom rose up to meet us and we exchanged paddles for poles. Standing and poling was a welcome switch from headwind paddling. It was maybe a quarter mile before we hit the rocky shallows and soon found a place to get out to the road. We carried up through the bushes and set up portage carts for the trudge up the hill around the falls at Doaks Road and around Holmes Mills, mostly because there was no place to put in. Once on Shepard Road, we put back in the river behind Harold York’s house and continued upstream. The Passagassawakeag (“The sturgeon place”) is a sweet little poling river and we made pretty good time. Some fun Class I sections, made challenging by the load of gear in the boats added some interest to the trip. We met some folks paddling down. Tommy told them they were going the wrong way. I told them we were headed for Portland, a claim of which they were rightfully skeptical.
Eventually the upstream challenge took its toll on us and we looked for the road on the left, finding a passable spot to get out and begin the second road portage of the day. Our original plan was to ascend as far as Banks Road, but we opted for a 200 foot bushwhack out to the road where we started our last trudge of the day. Off we trudged, hoping not to take a wrong turn when along came a guy named Ed, who offered up his yard as a camping spot for the night. Ed pulled out a 6-pack of beer and we each snapped one open and stood there drinking in the middle of the road. That was the best friggin beer I ever tasted!
We finished Day 1 at Ed’s house and enjoyed a cookout and a real spread of salads and sides. This was about the time Tommy announced that he was going to drop out of the trip. Being insulin dependent, he has to gauge how much physical work he is going to do in a day and take that much insulin. Well today he crashed midmorning and again on the Passy. Not a healthy way to be, he made the tough decision to drop out. In the morning, Ed got up and made us all eggs and taters and bacon. Great feed for us travelers. Like in olden times, this trip wasn’t meant to be a wilderness trip, it was to experience the ancient Indian routes through this section of Birch Country and we were enjoying the hospitality of those along the way. Before long, we’d said our goodbyes and Sean and I started out on the next four miles of portage to Quantabacook Lake. Thus began our descent of the St. George River.
The Saint George RiverOnce again, the wind looked semi-favorable and we started out under sail. We managed to get past Wood Island without tacking. We got into the narrows and managed a tack then went southeast some more, running out of water among the camps on the east shore. We dropped sails, grabbed our paddles and snuck in and out of the many coves, paddling in the relative calm, out of the wind. We stopped in the last windless cove for lunch. Lunch basically consists of having a peanut butter sandwich to break up the constant stream of sport bars, Snickers and jerky that fuel us all day.We passed through the lake outlet and into a quiet marsh-lined river. Gorgeous day. The Saint George River is a gem, quite wild with some good Class II runs, a little flatwater and everything in between. We had our sites on the campground on Sennebec Pond but it got too late and we found a passable spot riverside which we named “Tiger Beetle Camp”. Why? Because I had some raw meat and chicken which was frozen two days earlier and meant for dinner back then. I opened the bag and smelled it and it smelled fine. As I prepared the kabob skewers, I noticed a couple of orange and black beetles had magically appeared in the bag with the meat. I’m pretty sure they’re not really named tiger beetles, but I know I’ve seen them running in and out of rodent carcasses, reducing the carcass to a shriveled fur with bones during the course of a day. That was enough for the both of us, and we traded the kabobs for freeze-dried dinner. 7/3/2006. Up at 4:30 and on the river at 6. We started the day with a beautiful, quiet section full of birds and other wildlife, meandering through the marshy meadows and river maples. Upon entering Sennebec Pond, we set sails without pulling over and sailed down to Sennebec Campground. We wandered among the tenters and found a spot to fill our water containers. Back at the boats, I added my leeboard and we finished sailing the lake in fine style. Below the outlet of the pond the river was more of the same: a nice mix of current and rapids. There were a couple of drops we had to line down and one drop between bridge abutments that we portaged. One of the lined drops was an old broken dam. There was a gang of folks swimming below it in waters deeper than my 12-foot pole could fathom. What a sweet swimming hole! We stopped for lunch at the inlet to Round Pond. While Sean was taping his fingers I set out, sailing for the outlet. I went the wrong way and sailed clear across the pond before realizing my mistake. I turned and sailed back; no trouble and we eventually found the outlet, just a short hop from the inlet. This was actually the first time I was able to tack back and forth and make headway into the wind! We continued to sail down the river to Seven Tree Pond, even though it got real fluky in there: sailing through tree lined channels is definitely a challenge. At the bridge underpass into Seven Tree Pond, I watched Sean lean his boat so the mast would clear. I followed. Winds were light at the top of the pond but got stronger as we headed down. This was the first wind that could be construed as tailwind, though it was really just aft of starboard.
We sailed down to the outlet and put away the sails. There is a runnable dam and a nice take-out for those on a day trip. We snubbed and paddled down through the rapids. Both of us hung up our poles at one point or another. When snubbing down, it’s easy to stick the pole into a crevice where it gets stuck. At that point the choice is to hang on and bend your pole or let go, leaving the pole to bob in the current. If you have a second pole, you can just pole back up and retrieve it. Otherwise it usually involves some hiking and wading. There is a nice set of rapids in Union, approaching class III. Yee-haw! Sean chided me for not scouting them first. My original itinerary included a 34-mile day for today, as I could find no literature on any campsites between Sennebec Lake and Hungry Island out in Muscongus Bay. It was already getting late in the day when we passed through Warren. A glimmer of hope came from the river guide description that said we were to “pass through a steep wooded valley for 6 miles between Warren and Thomaston”. Being tidal, full of mudflats and between steep slopes, this sounded like the type of place that might offer a spot to pitch a tent between the waterfront houses. Sure enough, we passed around the bend from Warren into unspoiled wilderness. The blue river meandered through a great green sward of marsh grass, bordered by an unbroken oak forest. Down the river I could see a gray ledge pushed out through the marsh grass, water lapping at its edge: a natural campsite. I pulled in; Sean paddled just a hair past it, reporting the house tucked into the trees right there. Rats. The next bend revealed a couple more of these ledges. I scouted one while Sean scouted the other. Mine turned out to be perfect: It had a nice ledge outcrop into the river under the big old sky, where the breeze could blow away the bugs, a flat area in the trees for tents, and nothing that looked like any access from the road. It would have been nasty unloading the boats at low tide, but we arrived and departed at high tide. We moved right in; Sean cooked taters in foil and set us up for cooking kielbasa on a stick. This had to be one of my favorite campsites of the trip.
7/4/2006. Independence Day. We timed our departure to take advantage of the outgoing tide. Twelve hours in camp and off we went to Thomaston at a good clip. We passed under the bridge and hopped out. Up the bank to the convenience store, I asked about water and they offered to let us use the spigot out back. I bought a beer and celebrated the 4th with a 9AM Bud. Sean bought himself a couple of Snickers bars and some peanut butter. Back in the boats, the current was really going strong. We made great time through town and past the boat ramp. You might think back to Day One when we were sailing out of Searsport to Belfast. If we had opted to sail the 30 miles down Penobscot Bay, we would have pulled into Katawamteag, the “Great Carrying Place”, which is now known as Rockland Town Landing, and carried the three miles to the Thomaston boat ramp. The two routes converged and we turned right into the main sound and straight into the teeth of a merciless headwind…
|
| [More Adventures] |
