I met my friend Garrett “Buz” Shea at River Bend Park on the Potomac River in Great Falls, MD, to paddle on Sunday. I have been to the park a few times with my uncle to hike and bird watch but never to paddle and rarely in the summer. The park seemed so totally foreign to me since I’d been there mostly in the winter time.
We had a great paddle. The day was mostly clear and not too hot but fairly humid. Buz likes paddling up through the rapids so he can float back down through them so that is what we did. We paddled up the north side of the river and on the way back down tried to cut across to the south side at a cut through an island.
We almost made it but the current was such that after I watched Buz try to get up through this cut a couple of times, I found a way to get through that, albeit twisty and turny, was relatively calm. Unfortunately, that left us down river from another set of rapids that Buz wanted to run.
We broke down, got out of our kayaks and toted them over a set of rocks so we could be upstream where we wanted to be. Buz noted that that was the exact spot where he broke his toe on the rocks last year. He now doesn’t wear an open toe shoe while paddling…
Once back on the water, we paddled further upstream to about the point where Seneca Creek comes into the Potomac from the north and there is a forbidding set of rapids that we would have had to portage to get past. We decided to turn around and float back down river to our entry point. That was perfect for me. I wasn’t tired but I was ready to head back.
Buz said he got quite the good work out. He hadn’t paddled since we shot down the Shenandoah near Front Royal twice in two days over Memorial Day weekend while camping out at a friend’s place on the river. I can’t believe that it is that time already but we’ll be up there next weekend for the Labor Day festivities.
