A great group of folks paddled the Ten Mile River in Pawtucket on Saturday May 23, led by Antoinette & Herrick. We met at the Pawtucket Country Club, where we left our boats and headed off for shuttle duty. The best part was that the Club has nice clean bathrooms! Every put-in should be so equipped. Just don’t let on to the Club that we know this little secret (front of the clubhouse, through doors of smoked glass, take a left, on the left side of the hall). Waiters were setting up the banquet room across the hall - I was sad that we were too early to crash a wedding in our formal paddle skirts. Keith Gonsalves from the Watershed Council (and President of RI BlueWays) greeted us and invited us to future paddles he has organized but wasn’t able to paddle today. See riblueways.org for those paddles.
We were already a half-hour behind schedule as people continued to show up and the rain tapered off. The 3-mile drive to the take-out turned into a 30-minute tour of Pawtucket and Seekonk backroads because of the Memorial Day parade. Apparently no one had told the city fathers that Memorial Day wasn’t until Monday. But by the time we were back and ready to launch the rain had stopped.
The paddle starts with hardly any current, no wind and a wide berth along the edge of the golf course. Herrick led us past one lone swan who wandered around on the opposite side. The river twists and turns gently, becoming more forested and wild. No flowers were out today but enormous bouquets of poison ivy coated the banks. We went upstream for an hour or so until two blowdowns forced us to turn around.
We limboed under low-hanging trees while floating back downstream. At the Club again, we walked our boats around the 4’ spillover and got back in. The lower part of this paddle is much more narrow with way more corkscrews.
This is also where current plays a bigger role. Only a few yards from the put-in was a rock garden that required us to follow Antoinette’s thread-the-needle route. The next challenge was as if we were walking a tightrope through the sudden current. Word is that several areas of this river (including this one) are too low to paddle in summer so the choice of late May was perfect.
We continued through the stone wall corridors of Slater Park, watching bikers and joggers on the path above us and greeting guys fishing from the banks. Curiously they were all wearing red t-shirts. Or maybe it was one guy who kept jumping into his car and moving downstream as soon as we passed by. A zillion twists and turns later and the river widened out into the Central Pond Reservoir. Initially the water was so low that we were stuck good and proper on the sand.
Linda got out of her boat to find deeper water and found a deer’s carcass, probably a casualty of thin ice. This area will definitely not be passable in the summer.
Most of us elected to stay in our boats when we couldn’t find a suitable spot to stop for lunch. We ate to the cacophony of the biggest flock of swans any of us had ever seen - there must have been over 100. They kept their distance even while pretending not to see us. The only other sound was a pair of ducks overhead and the breeze rustling trees on all sides. We stayed there a long time, paddling through meadows of lily pads with yellow flowers, watching as the swans occasionally sparred and jousted. As crowded as this photo looks, it’s still only a small portion of the flock we saw.
Only another ¼ mile was required to reach our cars, parked on the Newman Ave bridge. This paddler’s biggest treat of the day - besides the obvious ‘being in the kayak’ - was to find a great blue heron stalking fish at the water’s edge. He stood perfectly still, sometimes moving his pencil legs very slowly to advance forward without causing any ripples. Eventually he moved way under the tree canopy so I could no longer see him. Only then did I admit defeat and de-kayak.
