AMC Paddle - Quinebaug

Today, we're paddling down the Quinebaug River from Southbridge MA to Thompson, CT.  This is the second time I've done this river, the first time being 3 years ago.  This time I'd thought I'd include a bigger map so you could have a little more perspective as to where this is.  From the map, you can see that we take the river into the extreme northeast corner of Connecticut.  Our finish point is just to the east of I-395.

It rained last night, so like most river adventures in the spring, the water is running very fast.  Can you say "quickwater"?   Basically that's what we had almost the entire trip.  However, that was only part of the story.

We have 6 kayaks and 2 canoes today (9 people). 

As I said, the water is running very fast.  We head to the far end of the Big Y parking lot to find a spot with an eddy to we have a better chance of launching without the boats floating away.

Our first casualty of the day.  One of our novice kayakers falls in the icy cold water.  We get the boat to shore, but unfortunately, he tips the boat again trying to get in.

We had one unplanned portage due to a very large tree, however this portage is planned.  We're in West Dudley at the south end of the Quinebaug River reservoir.  There is a picnic table and bench, so we decide to take an early lunch break even though we still have a long way to go.

Here's the reason we have to portage.  We got everyone off the river safely before they hit the dam.

A little further on down the river, the same paddler unfortunately fell in again.  Getting going again this time was more complicated.  The boat and paddle floated away, but we were able to retrieve them   Then we had to 1) find the paddler who had walked downriver a couple hundred meters, 2)  get him into one of the canoes, and 3)  get him down to where his boat was.  To get there, we actually had to paddle around an island and upstream a bit.  Here he is getting back into his boat finally.  He was thankful for the sun to help dry him out.

We continued downriver where one of our experienced paddlers accidentally took a spill into the river.  She was able to recover fairly quickly.  A little while after that, we had our second planned portage, this time in Fabyan, CT.  After that, I took the lead position to ensure that our boats didn't bunch up too much.  You can see the water behind me is still moving at a pretty good clip.

From time to time, I turned around to make sure we were all together.  

We finally arrived at West Thompson Lake, an Army Corps of Engineers project.  Of course, the wind was blowing right at us, so it was a bit of a challenge at the end of the day.  We traveled  a total of 12.5 miles but it took us 5:32.  Considering the fast current, that's a long time and can be attributed to people falling in.  With the shuttling of the cars in the morning, we actually didn't get on the river until 11:10 am (late), so it was almost 4:45 pm when we got off.  With the swift water, my maximum speed was 13.8 mph (wow!), but average was only 2.7 mph.  In any event, it was still 72ºF when we got off the river.  We were very thankful for this warm spring day.