(07/12/05) Incredible Cliffs - Westport to Essex -
(07/15/05) Mississquoi Bay - An International Experience - see below
(08/26/05) Where are We? - Why We Haven't Been on the Water - see below

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We had never paddled that far in one day. Now that we have done it we both readily agree that 23 miles is far enough for one day’s paddling. In a rare moment of realistic expectations we think we have reached our limit. (at least for the moment!).

From beginning to end, the day was filled with comedy and adventure topped off with a fantastic vanilla milkshake. Most days on the lake we spend looking for wildlife. Today I think we were the wildlife. Even by our standards, we looked a little strange in our wide brimmed hats and long sleeve shirts (Margy’s put her shirt on over her lifejacket making her look like a hunch back) but it was actually cooler dressed that way, as long as we kept our shirts and hats wet, than in just the bathing suits we had worn on Tuesday when it was equally hot.

Because the majority of Mississquoi Bay is located in Quebec, we reminded ourselves to have our drivers licenses handy even while paddling. At 5:30 Friday morning however, I was having some second thoughts about the simplicity of this plan and it occurred to me that maybe I should check the Cruiser’s Guide to see just what was involved in crossing the border in a boat in Mississquoi Bay. Most international boat traffic crosses the border at Rouses Point which links directly to the Saint Lawrence River via the Richlieu River. Mississquoi Bay is really just a large shallow dead end bay. Most of the boat traffic is local. I don’t suspect the people who live on the bay see a large red line running across it delineating one country from the other. There is not a large border crossing infrastructure to say the least. In fact the Cruiser’s Guide said we were to stop at a boat dock in Phillipsburg and call Canadian Customs from a phone provided for that purpose. On the way back into the US, a call to US Customs was also the standard procedure except that a call would not satisfy the immigration requirements for coming back into the US. In order to be able to just call in one needed to have filled out an I-68 form before leaving the country. The alternative was to beach one’s boat on the west shore just across the border, and walk across a private field up to the Alburg Springs Customs building. All of this was too much for my 5:30 AM brain and I could not believe kayaking around the bay would require this much red tape – wishful thinking of course. So after checking with my resident lawyer who was no help at all I decided to call US Customs who assured me that we indeed needed the I-68 form.

So not wanting to risk spending the weekend in Quebec, Margy and I made a precautionary side trip by car to the Highgate Springs Custom station on I-89 at 7:30 AM only to find 3 people already in line. It was at this point we started feeling like a rare species temporarily flown off course. The official behind the counter was very helpful but clearly had not dealt with many kayakers before. When prompted, Margy said we wanted an “F-16” form. I tried unsuccessfully not to laugh. (Numbers are not Margy’s passion.) The official said they did not have anything like that but they could provide a I-68 form but that we would have to wait our turn in line. 20 minutes later we got our turn only to learn that an I-68 form not only required $16 from each of us but also three pictures! It was at that point that we decided on plan B, beaching our kayaks and walking across the private field to the Alberg Springs Customs building. Glad to be on the move again, off we drove to the local Highgate Springs launch site. Getting started was a welcome relief and much to our delight, the water quality was not bad, at least it wasn’t green and we could see bottom.

We passed the Tyler place with its enticing waterfront. I noticed their raft had a huge water slide on it that would have been fun to try. Unfortunately the gulls were winning the war of perching rights. About half a mile north we passed a marsh bay and the opening to the Rock River. Except for the river area there are a steady line of camps along the shore, what I am beginning to think of as the typical Lake Champlain camp, modest in size, 20-75 years old, well kept up, and almost always well maintained lawns and gardens. Right now, orange and yellow day lilies are in full bloom. They grow wild around the lake and along the roadside. I love them for their spontaneity, naturalness and inclination to pop up anywhere. Once beyond the river opening the shoreline gradually becomes steep and eventually turns into beautiful cliffs almost 100 feet high. At some point we noticed three kayakers quite a ways ahead of us, moving in the same direction. We then noticed what appeared to be a dog swimming out from shore. We started to swing wide to avoid him (unlike my 10 pound dog, this yellow lab was not going to fit in either of our kayaks) but he clearly wanted to join us, as we were the closest kayaks to him. The bigger question was why was he there? Margy postulated that perhaps he belonged to one of the kayakers ahead and, being distressed at being left behind was trying to catch up with his master. Flat shoreline had turned to steep cliffs so there was no place for the dog to go even if he did return to shore. We decided Margy would paddle toward the shore ahead where there was some flat shoreline hoping to entice the dog to follow her and I would sprint ahead and try to catch up with the kayakers to see if the dog belonged to them. Margy’s hypothesis proved correct and when I finally caught up to the kayakers, they said it was their neighbor’s dog who they were taking care. They immediately turned around. Upon rejoining Margy I learned that she had successful enticed the dog to shore where he now sat whimpering. We were glad his keepers were on their way back to him and felt that at the least we had eased his distress at being left, if not perhaps saved his life.

Our maps indicated we were approaching the Quebec border but it certainly wasn’t clear to us where it was. There were camps atop the high cliffs and they had devised incredible ways to get down to the water. I have never seen such long steep staircases along the Champlain shore. One camp even had an outdoor elevator on rails.

Two miles north of the border we never saw, we came to Phillipsburg. We were not sure what to expect but sure enough the 1 st dock, long and high off the water, sported a tall flagpole flying the Canadian flag. At the end of the dock there was a yellow phone attached to a little shack. The dock was clearly designed for larger boats. There was no way we were going to climb out of our kayaks and onto the ladder to get to the deck of the dock and place our call so we paddled around the dock, then along it until we came to the shore. I watched the kayaks while Margy walked out to the yellow phone. Several natives watched us as if we indeed were a rare species. By the time I joined Margy, she was giving the person on the other end of the phone the make and color of our kayaks. He had wanted the registration number but short of that had settled for the color and make. She then supplied our dates of birth and cell phone number and then I heard Margy say “But I don’t have a pen or paper. We are in kayaks”. That was in response to the customs official saying he had a registration number for us to write down. I didn’t have a pen or paper either of course and it appears our customs official by now had figured out the nature of our adventure and so gave us our 11 digit registration number in 4 digit segments which Margy proceeded to repeat back to him and then we repeated to each other so we might remember it, for what reason we are not sure - 2005-1960-297. After we got back in our kayaks, Margy mentioned that we had a password as well – “kayak”! We spent about 30 seconds trying to figure out what we needed a password for. And here was a password we could remember. Surely it would be a shame not to use it.

According to the Cruisers Guide, Phillipsburg is the largest community on Mississquoi Bay although Venice Beach appeared to us to have a more developed shoreline. After passing a large campground filled with trailers just north of Phillipsburg, we turned west and paddled along a very shallow reed filled shoreline that was a wildlife refuge. Eventually we passed the opening to the Pike River. There was a primitive campground to the west. The river opening itself had the tell tail accumulation of large dead cottonwood trees lying horizontally on the shore that one sees at almost all the river mouths along Lake Champlain.

There is a fairly long north-south aliened point of land that separates the east part of Mississiquoi Bay from Venice Bay to the west. That peninsula is lined with well kept camps and houses on both sides. Until this point boat traffic had been fairly light and those boats we saw, moving, anchored or beached, where mostly catamarans or pontoon boats. The deepest Mississquoi Bay gets is 16 feet and then only in a small circle in the middle of the bay. The rest of the bay ranges from 1 to 10 feet deep. The water did not appear to have as much algae here as on the east side of the bay but was still a semi clear somewhat murky brown so in most cases we could not see the bottom. Margy stuck her paddle down to test the depth when we were about 100 yards off shore and the water depth was only 3 feet. ( Later, when we paddled along the Venice shore we noticed that the public beaches had delineated swimming areas extended 75 yards out from shore and even at the extreme ends of those areas we saw people standing in waist deep water.)

It was noon when we rounded Jameson Point and turned north toward Venice. That meant we were once again heading into the wind. We were hungry but it was clear there was no public land until we got to the northern most tip of the bay. A floating lunch meant we would be loose ground as the wind pushed us south so that was not an option. I was dreaming of the ice cream cone Margy promised we could find at Venice. (She had been here biking in past years and was sure there was ice cream to be found near the shore.) I thought I might be able to make it to there without lunch but Margy was not so sure. About half way up Venice Bay she confessed that she had eaten half her bagel. It took me no time to retrieve my peanut butter and jelly sandwich from the plastic bag at my feet and figure out how to eat it and paddle at the same time. It can be done and so we had our first “paddling lunch”. One might call it a step down from a floating lunch but it served our purpose quite well. We were all set for ice cream when we got to a public dock in Venice which just happened to have a wonderful ice cream shop not more that 10 yards from the shore. We both got big vanilla milk shakes while we took a well earned rest. We were just over half way, with 11 miles to go, downwind along the west shore. In fact from the northern most point in Venice Bay we could see the two large construction cranes at the Missisquoi bridge where we were going to take out. It looked like a long way and it was.

Not surprisingly the last 11 miles were the longest, even with the wind behind us. Maybe the milkshake did us in, if so it was worth it. We had trouble figuring our which nubbin or indentation on the map we had just passed, always over estimating how far we had gone. We looked forward to passing Province Point, a little point of land that sticks out to the south, just below the international boundary. It is in the US but can only be reached through Canada. There had been a solid line of camps and homes along the west shore, from Venice down to this point but the point itself was undeveloped. In fact, the development on the Alberg shore was not as dense as what we had seen in Quebec but the shore was lined with camps just the same.

Our reentry plan (Plan B) was to spot the Alberg Springs Customs house from the water, then pull up on the shore and walk through the infamous private field to check in. However, thanks to my irrational idea that the location was further south than it really was, we ended up about a mile and a half south of the check-in before we realized our mistake. The thought of turning around and paddling one and a half miles into the now 5-10 knot wind to check in, then retrace our path back down the shore and complete the two miles we had left to do was more than either of us really wanted to deal with. In short order we eliminated that option and came up with Plan C. We would drive up to customs in the car when we finished. And so we did. Our kayaks had each gained about 10 pounds from the time we took them off the car in Highgate Springs until we put them back on the car at the bridge. We barely managed to lift them up onto the roof. After throwing the rest of our gear into the back of Margy’s car, we headed up to Alberg Springs, looking at the back side of all the camps we had just paddled in front of. When we got to US Customs, approaching from the south of course, Margy swung a U and pulled in right behind a car that was just pulling out. “What have you ladies been doing today?” asked the customs officer. I handed him our driver licenses as I explained how we had kayaked around the lake, missed our stop, were too tired to paddle back, and so had driven up to check in and hoped that was OK. “You paddled all the way from Highgate Springs! More power to you.” He said. “And did you buy anything in Canada?” “Only an awesome milk shake in Venice” I replied. “And are you bringing anything into this country other than you tired bodies?” he asked. He then waved us on and I put our driver’s licenses away and we drove over to Highgate to pick up my car.

It wasn’t until I got home and found a message from Margy on the answering machine that I discovered I have put my driver’s license in Margy’s wallet and hers in mine. Enough said about 23 miles paddles in near 90 degree heat. We are ready to celebrate.

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