Holter Dam to Craig

We puttered around most of the day with Ted waxing the car and me doing laundry.  Sometime after five, the Weavers showed up to go kayaking.  We drove up to Holter Dam a little over eight miles up river and unloaded the boats.  While Ted and Trevor shuttled the vehicles and Tim worked on attaching a rod holder to his kayak, Bonnie and I stood there chatting.  She mentioned Wiscasset River and the man who had just backed down the ramp to take out his rubber fishing raft (by Outcast) had a startled look on his face.  We kept talking and I noticed he was watching and listening to us.  After a short while he excused himself and asked if we were talking about Wiscasset, Maine.  When we said we were, he said he was from Brunswick where I had worked for nineteen years and his wife works at the Brunswick Library.  He was out here to teach fly fishermen instructors how to teach fly fishing.  The small world experiences just keep on coming.  Last week it was Morgan Sharp's mother being good friends with Lu Dodson's brother in North Carolina.

Despite a dark cloud to the south of us and a rumble of thunder, we started down the river once Trevor and Ted returned.  Trevor was out in front while Bonnie and I took the middle.  Ted and Tim were trying to catch the big one and were much slower.  About a mile down the river, Bonnie and I turned back to tell the guys to take their time and we would do the shuttle so they wouldn't have to hurry.  The current is strong but we managed to get ahead of it to get back to where Ted and Tim were.  We got going again and the dark clouds passed us by.

It turned out to be another beautiful evening on the river with not as much wildlife as we had seen on other parts of the river but enough to keep us satisfied.  The ospreys were fishing and we saw a great blue heron fly by with the usual geese and ducks.  We got to one small island and I went left and Bonnie went right.  I could see something sticking up out of the river like a stick maybe.  As I got closer, it was the nose of a beaver.  As I passed it, it was close enough that I could have touched it with my paddle.  When I got to the end of the island, Bonnie was still not in sight so I just drifted in the fairly strong current.  A muskrat came out of his hole and followed me down the river for maybe a couple hundred feet just walking in the grass at river's edge.  Meanwhile, Bonnie was watching another beaver and babies playing in the water.  She said that when the older beaver saw her, it lay down on its lodge and looked just like a log lying there.

We didn't always know which channels we should take but followed Trevor who kept stopping to make sure we were still coming.  One channel was a little shallow and I put some more scratches in the bottom of my boat but we managed to get through.  When we got back to Craig, we loaded my boat and Bonnie and Trevor went back to the dam to get their car while I made dough for pizza crusts.  The first pizza was in the oven by the time Ted and Tim arrived.  It was a good thing we didn't count on fish for dinner.

They stayed until around eleven and Trevor told us about his recent travels to the Philippines with his church group to help feed the needy ravaged by last year's typhoon.  He had some interesting stories to tell and it was a really enjoyable evening.