Missisqoi, Ausable & New Haven - May 30-31, 2015

    It was another wonderful weekend of paddling for Ledyardites in the Northeast. Due to weeks of dry weather, it seemed like nothing was going to run Saturday so we were scrambling to figure something out. Luckily, at the last minute we got the message from the Vermont Paddlers Club that the Missisqoi (III-IV), a river way up north in Vermont would Release at 1300 cfs (lowish but still fun enough for 3 laps) and we came up with the master plan of combing that with a trip to the often running, but little run, Ausable Chasm (IV) @300cfs just over the state line in New York, and circumnavigating Lake Champlain in the process. At this level the Ausable was scrapey, but still awesome (any lower would lead to major pains in carrying boats over the shallow sections at the end). (Note: The biggest rapid on the river, Elephant Rock, is usually run river left of the boulder due to a dangerous undercut pocket at the bottom of the waterfall on river right, but at 300 cfs the left side is unrunnable so all except Esteban walked this rapid, Esteban had a clean line skirting the waterfall on a slide on river right. )
We paddled all day, narrowly escaped a thunder storm on the river, battled off mosquitoes and got home in the wee night hours. It was a fantastic day spent with Esteban Castano '14, Ari Koeppel '15, Isaac Green '17, Alex Lochoff'17 and Jesse Feldman-Stein '18.

And while it seemed like the weekend couldn't get better, with night came rain. At 2:00 PM the next day, the same crew (except with Jon King '15 and not Isaac) headed to the famed New Haven River (IV+) in Vermont at an amazing level around 800-950cfs. It was big and fun. All was well, except for a harmless swim in the rapid before Toaster (an 18' waterfall) which led to the retirement of our yellow Nomad 8.1 as it went over the falls :,(. (Jon was unscathed).

Cohaereamus,
Ari