[Paddlewise] Night Paddle

Tom, Carolyn, and I had planned to meet at 8:30 at Lake Hudson, partly due
to the fact that we've long wanted to do a night paddle at Lake Hudson, and
a just past full moon this evening made it a good night, and partly due to
the continuing heat, which had driven me off of daytime paddles all week,
and finally driven them off of them, too.
 
Things got more complicated at 6:30, when the power went out. It finally
worked out that a main transformer had blown up at the substation, and it
took time to fix, but at the time we thought we'd have power back in a
couple hours or so. In any event, it quickly got uncomfortably hot in the
house, and I decided I'd head for the lake, where I might get the benefit
of a cooling breeze. I got there, set the boat down on the shore, and found
some shade from the sinking sun. It was still very hot out, well beyond the
point of comfortably hot, but the shade helped a little.

Tom and Carolyn eventually showed up. We unloaded their boats, but found a
picnic table and just sat there talking until the sun was setting in a red
ball on the far shore of the lake, and we agreed to get going, but take it
very easy.
It didn't seem much cooler on the lake, and in a second I found out why --
I trailed my hand in the water, and found it quite warm, probably over
eighty. The lake wasn't going to do much to cool us off. We moved along
very slowly in the twilight, and decided to head over to the beach to see
what all the noise was about.

As hot as it was, the beach was surprisingly uncrowded, even for the hour.
Perhaps the lake's warmth had something to do with that, but possibly
because it was just too hot for a lot of people to want to do much of
anything that didn't involve air conditioning. One guy was well out in the
lake, swimming across or swimming back, a swim of close to a mile. Oh,
well, hypothermia wasn't going to be much of a problem for him at those
water temperatures.

At one end of the lake, there's a shallow channel that leads up to the
inlet stream. It's straight, probably a hundred feet wide, half a mile
long, and not much more than four feet deep most of the way up it. By now,
the light was starting to fade, but we decided to go back up the channel
anyway. There's a sand bar up there where in the spring we often park the
boats to take a breather, but I knew now that the lake was so low that the
sand bar was out of water and had grass growing on it. But, it's a quiet
spot, and we headed up there anyway. Just out of curiosity, I trailed my
hand in the water again, and found it not merely warm, but approaching
uncomfortably hot. I wished that I had a thermometer, because I'd guess
that the shallow water back there was pushing 90 degrees after baking in
the sun for several days.

I've spent so much time out there when the water is cold that to have it
warm seems very strange. The warmth of the water makes the lake smells much
more intense, and the quiet of the evening helped the sound of crickets and
frogs along the shores to either side. I saw a heron standing in the top of
a tree, silhouetted against the red evening sky. 

Before long, the channel shelved up to nothing, and my paddle strokes were
getting into the mud. "Guess that's as far as we're going," I told my
companions, and began to lever my boat around. Back under control, we
cruised slowly down the channel and back out to the main lake. By the time
we got there, the stars were coming out, and day had become a deep blue in
the northwest. It was getting dusky out on the lake, although I could see
the other two. The noise from the beach had quietened down a lot, and we
decided to stop there and let it get fully dark, and let the moon come up
while we waited.

The beach gradient is shallow, and it was a little difficult making a
landing, for in the dark it was a little hard to tell where the shoreline
was. Still, it wasn't a big enough of a deal for anyone to light a
flashlight. We found a picnic table in the deep shadows, and sat there for
a while in the still uncomfortable heat, talking about future plans and
such things, but after a while, there was an itch to get back on the water,
and without discussing it we found ourselves pulling our gear together and
heading back for the boats, dim shadows along the shoreline. Once back on
the lake, we took it very easy, just dabbing along, glad to be afloat. Over
my shoulder I could see a glow rising, and I turned to boat to see: the
moon was rising, round and red, filtered through a cloud deck that was
thick enough in places to block it out.  We all turned to sit and watch it
for a while, and noticed a thunderstorm in the distance, a hundred miles or
more to the southeast, and no problem to us, although the flashes made
interesting fireworks against the sky. After a while, we turned to go. 

As the moon rose, we paddled past the launch ramp, then over past the
campground, where the smell of wood smoke hung heavy on the lake from the
campfires of the weekend campers. Following the shore around, soon we came
to the narrow spot that leads to the west end of the lake.

The western part is shallower than the rest, and not as visited, which
makes it my favorite part of the lake. With the moon lighting the way,
there was no way we weren't going to go there.

It was very quiet out there. I know the place well enough to know exactly
where we were, in spite of the dim, nearly featureless shoreline, and we
paddled toward the end of the lake, talking quietly, when suddenly I heard
a strange cry. Tom and Carolyn heard it, too, and we stopped paddling -- it
was a loon, a rare but not unheard of visitor here. We sat there for
several minutes listening to the plaintive cry, and after it had stopped,
we moved on.

At the far end of the lake is a shallow bay, filled with weeds, that's one
of my favorite places on the lake. I wanted to get back into it long enough
to see how hot the water was -- the western part of the lake had been
warmer than the eastern part, earlier, but not as bad as the channel we had
explored. I knew that Carolyn had her rudder down and didn't want to mess
with it in the dark, so she and Tom stayed behind the weed line while I
pressed into the familiar little patch. 
We had all enjoyed watching the carp jump and play in this little bay
earlier in the summer, but with the heat of the last month the activity
there had died down to nothing, and I figured the carp were in deep water.
But as warm as the water was -- my guess was high eighties -- I had more
carp encounters in the first couple hundred yards than I'd had in a month,
several of them swirling the waters to escape as my boat crept up upon them
and surprised them. Finally, as I was paddling along, I felt a paddle blade
hit something firm, followed by a violent swirl. "Well, hello there, Mr.
Carp," I said, not very loudly.

Instantly, I was surrounded by splashing and cries, honks and squawks -- in
the darkness, I had paddled right into the middle of a huge flock of
sleeping geese! They weren't sleeping once they heard my voice, and their
activity woke geese farther away. In seconds, dozens of geese were hurridly
taking to the sky in the dark, honking and complaining. 

Deciding not to bother any other geese that hadn't gotten the message, or
those few that hadn't gotten through the molt or whose young weren't flying
yet, I paddled back out to rejoin my companions, paddling directly into the
irritating brightness of the moon to the narrow passage that would take us
back to the main lake. It was dead calm, and the water was flat and
mirrorlike, making an almost perfect reflection of the moon in the water,
distorted from where the wake of my bow hit it. 

All evening we had dawdled, taking our time, but now it was a little cooler
and we picked it up to our normal speed. It was still warm, and even a
little foggy, and it was sweaty going back across the familiar, flat lake.

Half an hour later, we were back at the landing, taking the boats out and
tying them down, savoring a good evening's paddle, and good memories, and
not knowing that I still didn't have power at home, and wouldn't have the
shower I had been promising myself, and wishing that I'd just stayed out on
the lake on this magical evening.

-- Wes

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