Unfortunately for me, I woke up in the wee hours of the morning and was violently (and stealthily) ill. I managed to creep back into bed without disturbing anyone, and got a few hours of fitful sleep before waking up with a raging headache and a sore throat.
Bazooka made sure we were loaded up with baked goods before dropping us back at Darby Creek, and we debated kidnapping Bri so she could cook for us on the river. She wasn’t having it, which was too bad.
Aaaand cue another long day of getting almost nowhere. We had hoped to make it into the D&C Canal, but the odds were not in our favor. We stopped for lunch to wait out the tides under an overpass on the edge of a landfill and built ourselves a tarp-and-driftwood fort to get out of the wind and sun. Steve joked that this was a “romantic beach vacation with an excellent view”; to be fair, we did have a pretty good view of the DuPont chemical factory, and it was super nice of him to make tea while I had a mediocre nap under the tarp.
High tide came early in the evening, and we pulled back out planning for another late night of paddling. Unfortunately the wind picked up, and as hard as we fought we couldn’t seem to get out of sight of the bridge we had spent the afternoon. We had to keep far enough into the water to avoid the rocky piers and breakwaters that jutted out from the banks, and between the wind and waves we couldn’t determine what the scattered lights on land were. Docked boats? Buildings? Barges? Not a clue. Objects kept looming out of the darkness, and their shape changed three or four times before we could decide what they were. We passed dilapidated piers, power lines, spits of land, and eventually a massive uprooted tree that barely missed scraping broadside against our hull.
Despite the area’s reputation for being “murdery”, we called it quits and pitched the tent on a narrow strip of beach vaguely near Delaware City. There’s a fine line between “this is sketchy, but we can pull it off” and “OMG what the hell are we doing”.