While taking a Covid holiday in Vermont, Mister Cowgirl and yours truly went on a whitewater trip.
It was May! Cold water. Hadn’t boated in whitewater in nearly a year. A river I’d never seen! And, only the two of us and the mister’s longtime friend BB, up from Wooster MA to visit.
Well, it was a fun trip, with only two really tricky areas. The mister paddled this when he was a kid visiting the family cabin, which is where we were staying, near Rochester, VT. Basically, we paddled the Upper White River, not quite from Rochester but a little bit south – not far from Ted Green Ford, if you know the area. We paddled it low, in the 50s CFS, and it was less rocky than we’d feared, with no portages required.
The first tricky bit we encountered was where the Tweed River flows into the White, like an upside-down T intersection. The white makes a little jog into the Tweed and then they continue together, with a sort of double-eddy as the result. It was easy to follow into the White’s eddy, but to cross the flow of the Tweed to the flow of the White, well that took some payment of attention, and all at once, not in installments.
The second tricky bit was further down, where there was a drop with a bit of a sneak to the side. A sort of S-turn eddy presented a real challenge in getting to a good place to take a line. It’s have been one thing to simply bomb through and take chances, but I’d followed BB and we took our time picking our way across the sneak.
It all worked out in the end, but when I tried a roll in calm water, for practice, it wasn’t happening. I made up for it with practice the next weekend.
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