The sound of the rising tide woke us up, and we were unpleasantly surprised to find that we were camped fifty yards from a steaming culvert unloading liquid waste from a nearby industrial site. No wonder the water had been so warm when we put to shore in the dark. I couldn’t decide if I would rather attribute my lingering headache and sore throat to illness or proximity to toxic waste.
Unrelenting rain had once again decided to join us and now all our gear was covered in weird-smelling sand, but at least the wind had died down. Fortunately we were within an hour’s paddle of the turn for the D&C canal, and as soon as we hit those waters the current picked up and we gained speed. Ospreys nested on the transmission towers along the channel, and large fish ruffled the surface of the canal. Both of us were glad to be off the Bay and back in a river-like setting, and after an in-boat brunch we felt way more human than we had waking up on the shores of a chemical dump.
Just after lunchtime we pulled into the Summit North Marina and parked the canoe between a pair of yachts that were each bigger than my apartment. We were disappointed to find that the marina bar was closed for renovations. (At this point we’d come to terms with the fact that we were basically on a 500-mile-long, paddle-powered pub crawl.) The dock hands were in such disbelief that we’d paddled there from upstate New York that they let us leave the boat overnight for free and even gave us a lift to nearby Lums Pond State Park so we could get a campsite for the night.
The campground had zero staff on site (to be fair, they were “open” but it was still very early in the season) so we ended up reserving a site over the phone. They had yurts, so we splurged and figured we could dry out all our gear and shake the sand out of our pants.
The definition of “disappointment” is finding what appears to be a heating unit in your yurt and nearly weeping with joy as you drag your soaked gear out of the 50 degree rain… and then discovering that it’s just an air conditioner. I’m honestly not sure which of us was closer to tears.
We made the best of it and covered every inch of the yurt’s interior with damp gear, periodically getting up to sweep the sand outside as it fell off our stuff. Some careful math determined that we could have a meal made entirely of fruit snacks and still have enough for the remainder of our lunches. We hadn’t exactly been “roughing it” the previous week, but it was still nice to be out of the rain and sleeping on a mattress… even if it was about 4” too short for Steve’s comfort level.