MBCKC Paddle Reports

May 6, 2008 paddle on Fish River from County Road 48 to Cowpen Creek
Frank Laraway led this paddle. He phoned me and one other paddler, Dave Owen, to go along. Dave has canoe paddling experience. Dave says Larry McDuff gave Dave his introduction to kayak paddling. We put in at Frank's house. If you want, you could put in at the county park called Bohemian park, on Fish River near C.R. 48 and Langford Road. But Frank has been eager about this paddle since last year when a government grant paid a contracted crew to clear the tree falls on Fish River. Development up stream has been going on for some time. Frank has lived on this river over 30 years and only in the past few years has he had problems with flooding. For a while, after the clearing work, the river was clear. The flood the week before deposited a new jam down stream, but I'm getting ahead of myself.The river flow was pretty good for our paddle. The river gauge at the intersection of Fish River and C.R. 104 reported a river height of 1.7 feet. To check on any gauge go to :http://www.srh.noaa.gov/mob/hydro.shtml We put in about 8 a.m. The air was a little cool and the water was really cool and tea colored. Paddling downstream we hit the first chute between sunken logs which squirted us to the left and the riverbank went to the right. Wheee. A double switchback and the first obstacle was in the way: a newly fallen pine tree. I used the butt skootch method to cross this obstacle. The other two had paddled ahead of me so I was doing catchup when they reached the first logjam, a very impressive construction of logs to a height of five feet above the river and connecting both banks. An inflatable blue and white raft was hanging from the third log up. We would be seeing more of those. Frank nosed his boat into the right side of the river and a length upstream of the jam. He clambered up the bank quickly and found a trail had already been cut through the trees for a portage. One by one he helped us pull the boats up on top of the bank and we dragged them single file through the trees down the path to the river below the log jam. The river is narrow here and the banks are steep. The trees in the log jam were cracked and smelled of cedar.On the other side, our put in was a small bar on the inside of the curve. Frank was the first to get underway and he promptly snagged a branch overhead and rolled over. He surfaced saying, "That is the sort of thing I tried to warn you about, Dave." Dave said, "I didn't see it." I said, "Do it again." We worked together to dewater Frank's boat and once again we set out in quick current between high steep banks decorated with titi, white cedar, pine (Name That Pine!), and the ever present privet which are in bloom.We paddled a little ways and stopped at another tree fall, a large cedar that trapped some smaller limbs. Frank was first to climb out of his boat and stand on the tree. He put his boat over and tied it off then helped Dave and then me to cross. Short branches could have impaled any one of us had we fallen on one of them.The river flowed mainly south, but switchbacks appeared often enough to give us some variety. The next obstacle was a treefall in a wider, shallower reach of river; the leafy top of a tree was in the river collecting bits of flotsam. The portage was extremely easy over the right sandy bank. From here on down we were free and clear to navigate. We were also leaving the wilderness for the beginnings of development near Red Barn Road. I do not own the Silverhill topographic quadrangle map so I was still waiting for some navigational fix to place us on the Magnolia Springs Quadrangle map on my boat deck. A series of four switch backs seemed to fit the squiggles on the map. Then Clay City homes showed up; Wow have they upgraded after the hurricanes. Then the Leatherwood home showed up where the club stopped one afternoon to take shelter during a thunderstorm. Polecat Creek enters Fish River and formed an island, but someone had to blow up a bit of land and change the course of the water. We explored two inlets on the right, below the juncture of Polecat Creek. The first inlet was a dead end for a home. The second was Horseshoe Pond which we followed all the way around and came out the other end which had enough water to float us over and back into Fish River.Now we really were in the thick of developed land and we followed the river to Cowpen Creek and entered that to go to our takeout. The creek water became clearer as we proceeded upstream. We took out at a residence and loaded the boats in Frank's truck. The time was 12 noon when we went out the gate.