May 30, 2011 Fish Creek

Today was our first outing of 2011 with "the Yakkers". If you haven't read my Blog before, this is a group of our kayaking friends that we take a large percentage of our kayak outings with. We try to vary the places we go to. Every year we discover some new places. Today we took them to Fish Creek. I don't think too many of them had been on Fish Creek before. We met at The Kayak Shack at Staffords Bridge. There were 14 of us in 13 kayaks. We launched and headed for the dam at the Schuylerville end of the Creek.

Some of the Yakkers

It was a nice paddle out. The carp were spawning. They are fun to watch as they splash around and make quite a racket. If you didn't know what it was, it could be a little creepy I guess. The first time I heard the carp on Round Lake I was a little nervous. You could only hear them in the weeds, but could not see them. On Fish Creek, they were right on the edges of the water. No doubt as to what was making all of the noise. You could see their fins. I hope this video will play for you. I took it on the paddle back in. It was hard to know where to point the camera as they were all over!

 

The next video is good at the beginning, but then I sort of drift around.

 

The paddle today took us about 3 hours. We went all the way to the dam. There is a "fun" part where you have to go through a No Wake zone. There is an older gentleman that is sort of the "Keeper of the Channel." I guess he lives there. We always see him when we paddle Fish Creek. He tells people where they can and can't paddle. Keep between the  red and green markers, stay between the buoys... He can be a nice guy if you let him. As he says, he's there to help. We've seen him butt heads with people though. They don't like being told what to do.

The Keeper of the Channel

He told us about a statue he built to protect us. He even gave our friend Doug a book to read about the water. We didn't get a chance to look at it. So here it is, and I guess we can thank him for a safe trip today.

The Statue

We had a hot paddle back to the launch. Glad we didn't start any later than we did. Lots of kayaks heading out in the heat. We are a early paddle group. Usually the conditions are more favorable early in the morning.
A few more pictures of our trip:

Cindy & Nancy

 

Megan, Tim & Gary

 

Tim

 

Nancy