Eye On The East : Three Boats Over

April-May 2006

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
To download a pdf copy of the magazine click here: > DOWNLOAD

by Adam Bolonsky

Winter paddling came into vogue quickly here on the East Coast. One winter, whoosh! and a few dozen paddlers bought drysuits, retrofitted their windsurfing or diving booties for paddling, and discovered that they could buy, from the local sporting goods store, cheap neoprene hunting gloves that ripped and tore at the palms just as easily as the ludicrously expensive kayaking gloves they could buy on mail order. The winter was frigid as usual: weeklong spates of daytime temps that rarely rose above 20 F, sunsets at 4:30, nights in the single digits. The North Atlantic had ground its way through half its annual thermal inversion, barely drawing enough heat from the sun’s lowered angle to hold water temps in the low 40s. Local harbors were locked in ice. If you didn’t paddle, choices were to ski or ice skate or go south—or to hunker down until the first crocuses pushed their tendrils up through the snow and announced that yet another winter was drawing to a close.

A gang of us set out on a cold morning from a put-in in Manchester, Massachusetts, called out by Bob Burnett, founder of the North Shore Paddlers Network—restless, peripatetic, enthusiastic, proudly bald. The plan: meet at Tucks Point and take our first winter paddle. Okay, I figured: if Bob says so, I go. I threw the bottom half of an old neoprene drysuit and a Gore-tex paddling jacket, gloves and booties into my car, and stuffed into a bag a neoprene hood, long sleeve silk undershirt, wool sweater and running tights to keep me warm in the drysuit. Finally I hoisted onto my roof the 16-and-a-half-foot stitch-and-glue I had built, a little beauty whose bulkheads I had not yet, ummm, gotten around to sealing with sufficient 3M 5200 to prevent its fore and aft compartments from flooding should I pop the spray skirt and wet exit into the freezing ocean.

Details, details. I was too nervous about the idea of paddling on a cold day on the winter ocean to consider matters such as my kayak swamping stem to stern and sinking up to the coaming.

There’s plenty to see when paddling the winter Atlantic off New England. The water achieves an unusual clarity once the thermocline has tumbled through its annual inversion. The top layer loses that darkling fogginess which otherwise gives the sea here such a characteristic aura of mystery and darkness. While the Atlantic’s clarity will never match that of more southerly oceans, you can peer down to some of the shallower architectonics that lie below. You can see the nearshore bottom’s shallow ledges and bars, the shelves and drop-offs. No other boats are on the water save the occasional shellfisher dragging a dredge over the bottom, or anchored urchin boat, its diver breathing oxygen through an air hose while he plucks urchins from the bottom and listens to music piped down from the pilothouse.

Adam’s home waters, off Cape Ann.

We launched and slipped through the gap at House Island before surging over the rock reef to the north. We took a few moments to assess the conditions, sniffing the cold air, and began paddling north along the shore. The waves were large and glassy and smooth, the energetic missives of a big storm that had recently subsided a few hundred miles offshore. It was cold, about 18°F, clear and cloudless, the air sharp enough to plant chilblains in my fingers in the few moments it had taken me to remove my gloves to unclip my tie-down straps from the roof. The rollers had that characteristic pattern: first a parade of unremarkable juniors, followed by the one big boy whose larger aunts and uncles, the echoes of the storm’s true power, rumbled in before crashing on shore. Anybody who’s surfed a board, boat or stomach knows how the pattern works: when the big boy lowers his shoulder underneath you, you move out several yards to position yourself on the forehead of the even larger wave to follow. Other than the cold—about 18F—there was nothing unusual about the day except that for many of us this marked the first time we had been on the winter ocean.

We followed Burnett dutifully. Then, as now, the guy knew what he was doing. Most of us trusted him as one would an older brother. Up the coast, past the cliffs at Eagles Head and the hulking granite face which overlooks Watkins Cove. I felt good in my boat and enjoyed paddling the hull I’d built myself, its round-bottomed form requiring so little to propel it forward. I’ve always enjoyed the cold, especially clear winter mornings when the sun is out. I kept adjusting my hood to keep myself warm: off my head when I got too warm, back on when I chilled. I held back my exertion just enough to hold the sweat in my pores, so I wouldn’t dampen my insulating clothing. I also had on a neoprene facemask, and found that, just as when running or skiing, it helped keep me warm by insulating the air around my mouth and nose.

The rollers’ pattern continued: small boys; one big boy; then big surly brutes that crashed on shore, thick with whitewater.

Contact tows are best for fast rescue work in close quarters. Make sure your tow line has a float so that the carabiner doesn’t sink, taking the towline with it.

At a deep nook in the shore, where Cape Ann’s coast begins its cant eastward, there’s a series of ledges and tall, angular boulders. Here Burnett scooted in towards a large rock garden crisscrossed by leads, passages, chutes and holes. The spot’s prominent feature was two hulking boulders, flat and half-submerged, between which lay a narrow chute. Burnett pivoted his boat shoreward, glanced back at an incoming roller, and sped his boat forward as the wave rose. As the vacuum created by the rising roller’s suckback drew the water out of the chute, drawing down most of the water around it, Burnett’s bow lowered. He began to jet forward. As the wave crested and broke, forming a rounded curl, Burnett shot down it between the two boulders and emerged shoreward in the heavy tumult of whitewater and greenwater swirl. It was a sweet looking move.

Now Chris. He lined up as Burnett had before. His was the first of the big boys, larger, more powerful, and whose runout proved rough, heaving, and not the least smooth. Chris sailed through the chute at a cockeyed angle and capsized the moment the broken wave spat him out. He didn’t wet exit—was he stuck in his boat? John sped in to rescue, got caught by the next wave’s curl, and as he pulled in alongside Chris for a bow rescue, was capsized by the wave when it hit the bottom and bounced. Now Keith raced in to help. The wave that followed caught his boat’s bow, pivoted his kayak so that it lay parallel to the wave as it broke. He began to side-surf, bracing waveward. Someone shouted. John turned in time to see Keith’s side-surfing boat careening in towards him. He dove down. Keith passed over him and crashed into the two capsized boats.

“Use a THROW BAG!” Burnett yelled.

As a group, collectively, we had:

No throw bags.

No contact tows.

No helmets.

As for radios and towlines, there were a couple here and there, but no one knew who had what, or where.

My kayak, true to typical wooden-kayak builder’s puffed-up sense in the value of the beauty of wood above all, had no decklines on it, for fear that decklines might obscure the visibility of a few precious square millimeters of painstakingly varnished wood. Moreover, my bulkheads were not watertight. Were I to dare go in and help, and end up in the water like Chris and John, my boat would flood and go down.

I floated with the others in a shocked semi-circle outside the break zone.

At the post-paddle-pig-out that followed, we all chewed this one over. Keith had managed to tow John out of the surf zone by way of a laborious swim-and-kick rescue, with John kicking in the water, grasping his bow and Keith’s stern as Keith stutter-paddled him out of the break zone. Someone else, meanwhile, glided in to haul Chris back into his boat. The wave-sets had by then completed their furious cycle and sent in their trains of smaller-shouldered juniors.

“Funny thing is,” Burnett chuckled as he chomped on his burger, “is when we got to Tucks I looked into my gear bag and said ‘Throw bag? Tow ropes?’ Nahhhh. We don’t need them. Not with this crew.”

See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PSPN to see what Bob is up to now, on the west coast.