[Paddlewise] A familiar place

The days are noticably getting shorter, now; sunset is an hour or so
earlier than it was back at the end of June, and working in a session on
the lake between dinner and dark is getting harder to accomplish -- and
more so on this evening, since dinner, while good, was a little bit late,
so I tried to not waste time as I unloaded the boat, parked the car and
trailer, and got going.

Lake Hudson, again. I suppose it could be my fortieth or fiftieth trip out
here this year. I like going other places, too, but this is familiar and
close to home, and I almost always see something different or new, so once
again I'll take a familiar trip to my favorite place on the lake. After
all, I haven't been there since the day before last. 

It's five after seven when I get moving away from the boat launch. As
usual, there's a little breeze, but with the sun sinking I could pretty
well expect that it'd be a dead calm by the time I get back. Once I got the
boat up to speed, I did a little mental planning. Sunset was an hour and
ten minutes away, and if I got back in an hour it'd leave me a few minutes
to get the boat on the trailer and watch the sunset. It usually takes 20 to
25 minutes to get out to Goose Bay, depending on how hard I want to paddle.
So, that gave me fifteen or twenty minutes to hang around and see what's
happening.

Even though the boat is familiar and the way is familiar, it took a few
minutes to get my stroke rate settled down and get used to paddling. The
sun is about 60 degrees off the starboard bow, and low enough to be
irritating. I cant my baseball cap to one side of my head, and that keeps
the worst of it out. Farther down the lake, close to the narrow spot that
hides the lesser-known western part of the lake, I edge close to a tree
line to take advantage of paddling in their shade for a couple of hundred
yards.

As I come through the narrows, I meet a fisherman in a john boat coming the
other way. He's got an old, old Johnson on the back, and while he's running
slow enough on this no-wake lake, he's still leaving a noticible trail
behind him -- it must just be something about the shape of the boat. As I
come around the corner, I can see how far that wake has spread, for I can
see it rolling across the dead still water as much as a quarter mile off. I
check my watch -- this spot is ten minutes out if I'm really hurrying, and
the fact that it's taken twelve means that I'm just moving ahead comfortably.

The western section of the lake opened up in front of me, and as I turned
into it, the sun moved over to the other side of the boat -- but behind a
cloud, so I didn't have to cock my head to keep it out of my eyes as I
looked around. It's still obviously summer, although in places the leaves
are beginning to look a little old, and here and there are tiny patches of
yellow and gold, harbingers of the slide downhill to winter that's sure to
come. One of the first signs of it came only two or three weeks ago, when I
got back from Canada to discover that the weed beds around the lake had
thinned out, like they usually do in late summer; some places that had
gotten almost impenitratible have opened up again, with only scattered lily
pads to have to paddle through.

My favorite part of the lake, the little backwater that I call "Goose Bay"
usually has something interesting to see, which is why I keep going back.
The last time I was here, it was a big heron that let me get unusually
close and watch for a while, and the time before that, a large muskrat that
left me wondering why I'd never seen one there before. Tonight was no
exception to the rule. I'm not much of a birder, especially when it comes
to identifying little grey-brown birds, but there was a flock of them
flying around. Every so often, a bird would dip down to the surfact of the
bay, and in a quick dart pick up something, leaving a ring of ripples where
there had just recently been something -- an insect, I would presume. I let
the boat drift to a stop and sat there very quietly while the feeding went
on all around me. I couldn't see any insects close enough to discover what
had these birds so worked up, even though some birds were scoring close
enough to me that I should have been able to pick out a larger insect. But,
whatever it was, they were finding plenty to eat. I would imagine there
were a couple hundred birds there, and they dappled the water like a really
good trout rise. 

All of a sudden, the feeding frenzy quit, except for a handful of
stagglers on the far side of the bay. I glanced at my watch -- just enough
time to paddle back at a reasonable speed if I wanted to see the sunset. I
turned to go, knowing that if I stayed around, I might see something else
interesting, but there would be something there the next time, too. Once
outside the bay, I started seeing dragonflies, which had been noticably
absent inside the bay -- could this have been what these swallows or
whatever were feeding on? It made for a reasonable possiblity.

It was a familiar trip back, watching the odd fish jump in the distance,
and once I got back out into the main part of the lake, seeing two or three
boats still out trolling, and once again, I was thankful that the fishermen
and we kayakers had a quiet place to go to and enjoy, for all its faults
and all its familiarities. 

My timing was perfect -- I got out of the boat just an hour after I'd left,
and got the last strap on the boat just in time to turn around and watch
the big red ball sink into the trees on the far side of the lake. I stood
there for a few minutes watching the spectacle, thankful that the year's
heavy mosquito hatch had thinned out, and knowing that there'd be all too
few times to enjoy a perfect late summer hour like that before the season
was gone.



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