Steve woke up feeling like a new person and consumed his normal pair of breakfast sandwiches, and then we set off to tackle a day that now included an extra 13 miles due to our chicken-based shortfall. On tidal waters. In unrelenting, blazing sun.
We paddled hard until we could see the Philadelphia skyline on the horizon… and then kept paddling. And paddling. For HOURS. For an endless series of bridges we never seemed to reach, past landfills and chemical plants and trash barges, all while the sun beat down on us full force from a cloudless sky. The pristine, crystal-clear waters of the upper Delaware had given way to a translucent brown solution of chewing gum, wrappers, and dead fish parts. The smell didn’t deter either of us from getting fully submerged when we stopped for lunch in an attempt to cool off, but it may have been related to Steve barfing up part of his breakfast.
Eventually we timed ourselves passing under a bridge and realized we had ceased making functional headway, and rather than continuing to crawl forward at less than an eighth of a mile per hour we pulled up at an East Philadelphia boat launch to reevaluate. We were ashore just long enough for me to get verbally harassed by some locals and for the local police to inspect our boat and tell Steve he should “get his knife out and keep it handy” before pulling back out into the tide to find safer harbor.
An hour of furious paddling against the rising tide landed us at Camden Petty Island, which we affectionately dubbed “Murder Island”. We were sketched out enough by our previous landing and the visible grave remnants on Murder Island that we tied onto a half-submerged piling from a rotten pier and resigned ourselves to waiting out the tide in the boat. As Steve fired up the Jetboil in the stern, I dug out headlamps and backup lanterns. We had twelve miles to go before we could get off the river, and we were going to have to do it in the dark.
As much as the following six hours sucked, paddling a canoe through downtown Philadelphia after dark was hands-down one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. The water was dead calm. The jetskis and pleasure boats that had plagued us with their wakes all day had retired to the marinas. The bridges and the skyline went from a distant silhouette on the horizon to a glimmering array of lights reflected all around us on the river, and we could hear the echoes of hundreds of thousands of people going about their evening. Periodically a barge would loom out of the darkness and we lurched through the wake, knowing full well that despite our running lights they probably had no idea we were there. We passed the tall ships, aircraft carriers, dockside cafes filled with laughing couples drinking wine under string lights; not a soul made any notice of our passing. It felt like we were getting away with something, sneaking through the city under the cover of darkness with only the splash of the paddles to give us away. It was completely surreal.
My rookie rugby coach and dear friend Bazooka was meeting us at Darby Creek south of the city, and our directions were “look for the quarantine house after the airport, then turn right at the statue of the king of Sweden by the Holiday Inn”. Shockingly, that made total sense from the river even if it took us until 2am to finally reach the place. A true hero, Baz met us with cold beers; this made us feel better about having the hose turned on us before we were allowed in the house.
We only made it as far as the couch. I remember ‘Captain Blood’ being turned on, and then I passed out.