First the final day, then the final mile…and finally, the final paddle stroke .  Whew!

It was great to see so many people at the dock. Their support and the support of so many others  for all that my effort represented has made it all worthwhile. My deepest thanks to all of you.

My kayak has gone into hibernation but it’s just the opposite for me, for now I can focus my energy on helping those who are  making
CBW (Citizens for a Better Wareham) become a vital,positive force that will, over time, bring about the changes we need .

To return to the actual paddlethon for just a minute….I think all most you will get a kick out the statistical breakdown that Peter Baum has fashioned out of the information collected by that tiny  GPS that was always tucked under the cover of my rear hatch.  My vision of how the 1,000 mile goal could be reached in a ten week period  turned out to be almost “right on the mark”. My feeling was that in the 70 day period I’d allotted that I should be able to get 50 days of decent paddling weather, and that it was going to be up to me to make every effort to shoot for at least 20 miles every time .. as it turned out, I reached the goal after 46 paddling days.

My only fear was that it was going to be boring. Not so.

My eyes have seen just about every foot of Wareham’s shoreline, and I’ve had the added pleasure of watching tht trees along that shore change from green to bright red,orange, and yellow , then to muted versions of those same colors,and finally to the grey-browns of winter.   I watched as people all along that shore went into a change themselves: every day the boat population went down, dock floats were hauled out, until finally I was just about the only craft plying the water.

And then there was the fun of seeing my bird friends from the North show up in the same places at the same time they have for thousands of years. First the pairs and the small family groups, and now they’re all here and settled in for the Winter.

How could I have feared it was going to be boring? Being “on the water” is never boring. Not only are two days never the same…no two hours are ever the same.  I think it’s uplifting spiritually to be sublimated to the wind and the tide, and the sun, and to be dependent on your own body for your propulsion. That’s about as elemental as boating can get, and I’ve had the gift of 1,000 miles of it.

I  regret that I didn’t have a proper camera until these past three weeks. They’ll be showing up on this site soon, and perhaps we can figure out a way to give you more visuals at a winter gathering at The Wareham Free Library.

There were at least 50 Brant geese  in the middle of Tempest Knob bay along with small flocks of Buffleheads, Mergansers, and Black Ducks.
Ice is appearing in the coves now; not enough to block progress, but it’s a pretty strong suggestion that the water temperature has plummeted in the past few days. It’s a wonderful motive for making  me sure that I keep the kayak right side up.

There’s a female Long Tail duck that seems to want  to be seen by people dining at The Narrows. She’s bigger than a Bufflehead, and her head is mostly white now that she’s in her winter molt. According to David Allen Sibley the Long Tails do a lot more molting than the other ducks…something like 5 or six times a year. Just a month ago this bird had a pattern totally unlike the present one, but I guess that has been the case with you and me also. A month ago I was a mix of cotton and wool; now I’m 100% wool.

Canada Geese  “own” The Agawam.  There was a flock of about 70 of them. I jumped them first down by the Nail Factory., and three or four times later as I covered my usual route.They have to take off into the wind and that meant that they had me right in the middle of their take-off strip. Seventy geese all talking at once is a lot of noise: not just the honking, but the swishing of their wings and the splattering of 140 webbed feet as they use a mix of wing power and paddle power to get their heavy bodies airborne. There were six swans , too, and let me tell you that having a swan pass just about 10 feet over your head is something you’ll always remember. They are BIG.

Tomorrow is meant to be horrible, so my mileage is stuck at around 988 until Thursday. All I need is four hours of fairly decent paddling weather .     I’ll  try to arrange my route on Thursday so that I will hit the 1000 mark on Saturday morning as I’m passing the Nantucket Lightship next to Besse Park.  11 o’clock.  I’ll hope to see you there .

There’s been talk of a “Whoop-Dee-Doo-Dee” event to celebrate the 1.000 mile goal  next Saturday. That would be fun for me and I hope for others.   My initial challenge was all about resolve.  I am resolved that the only way the Town of Wareham can “get to a better place” is through strengthened education.  I have appreciated the  support of people who share that goal, and my wish is that people treat my paddle effort as a symbol of what can be accomplished by people who won’t give up and who join forces with other people who won”t give up. Reaching the 1,000 mile goal is not an end: it”s  symbol what people can do when they set their minds to the task. You define your goal, you divide it into “do-able” chunks, and you just hunker down and do what needs to be done to stay on track.

Friday: What a difference a day makes in Buzzards Bay!   Flat calm.  Great day to head for Stoney Point Dyke, then back to the Narrows, and around to Cromissett, on up to Great Hill, with repeat loopdey-loops for the rest of the day.  We’re closing the gap on the 1,000 mile goal.m I haven’t seen the GPS read-out yet but I’m going to guess that we’re just past the 950 mile mark.  I’m going to have to start paying attention or I’ll paddle right past Chicago!

My thought of the day:   As we seem to be in a national financial situation of historic proportions , journalists are cranking out vignettes from the Great Depression of The Thirties.  Yesterday I read about Mayor Fiorello Laguardia’s reaction to  The Crash: He opened up storefront libraries all over the city.  He saw the need. People out of work would be looking for ways to improve their chances for getting a job.  Another article about the Depression spoke of the phenomenon of the increase of literacy during depressions.

All of this ties in with things I’ve said before: A fully functioning library is not a frill. The poorer a community becomes, the more it needs a strong library system.

I  got the boat ready and I suited myself up. As I looked out on the bay I found myself thinking, “This  kind of wind was practically a daily experience when I paddled the coast of Newfoundland as a young ( I was only 60) paddler 18 years ago…..If I’d been unable to handle stuff like this I’d never have made it out of Newfoundland……Let’s  give it a go.”

Fortunately, a stronger  inner voice spoke up,” Hey, listen to me Ultra Geezer!…..You’ve been having trouble with winds that are less than what is out there. You’ll have to put the strongest effort  of the 900 miles so far from the very first stroke…a great way to strain something that could mess up the last 100 miles….Act your age, Stupid!”

“What do you mean, “Act your age?…..I’m only 18 years older than  when I could handle a wind like this!”…..

Good sense reigned. The humbled Ultra Geezer put the kayak on the roof racks, got out of his Top-of-the Line kayak gear,and drove home to spend the rest of the day getting caught up on the crossword puzzles he’d been neglecting.

At dawn I peeked out of the bedroom window and saw a bay with absolutely no wind. That condition lasted all through my beach walk with Sereia, all through the time I spent tending my poultry. ..AND, for the first hour and a half of my paddle today!  Not a breath of a breeze. I headed for Sandy Point Dyke which is 3.5 miles from our beach. turned right and paddled to the end which is another 1.75 miles. The gift of flat water had to come to and end, and did as I was backtracking from the outer end of the dyke. In the space of 10 – 15 minutes the water went from glassy calm to what I have become accustomed to as a Buzzards bay veteran. About an hour later, once I got past Long Beach Point, the paddling became fun again.

There was a large flock of Brant geese 100 yards west of the Tempest Knob pier but the Wildlife Moment of The Day caught me totally by surprise as I took a cruise up the Agawam. After you leave Merchants Row behind you the river does a lot of twisting and bending and around the corner of one of these sharp bends there are two huge boulders that are covered with water at the top of high tide but were two or three feet out today. Perched on top of one of those boulders was a harbor seal! I don’t think I’d have been more surprised if I’d seen a moose!

I’m anxious to have the GPS tell me the mileage of these past few days. I’m creeping up on a major milestone: 900 miles. That’s going to be a good feeling. I’m not going to “coast” when I hit that mark because I have a great distrust of the weather from here on. Even on “good” days I have to remember that the water has now reached a temperature that makes me try to avoid “short cuts’ that take me an unsafe distance from the shore.

Nine hundred miles. When I look at the places that a 900 mile long path would take me I am just blown away. I’m practically in Chicago! I’ll be doing jig saw puzzles with my grandson in a couple of days. I’m also closing in on St. Johns Newfoundland where I have lots of friends I haven’t seen for almost 2 years. I’ve already been to Bermuda and I’m more than a third of the way back. In my hypothetical southern route I’ll soon be out of Georgia and headed for a visit with an old friend form my Navy frogman days. In the real world I still have about a week of weary arms and a sore butt. We’ll get it done and then convert the resolve that made it happen into positive action that will get Wareham to a better place.

Our numbers are growing and we are learning from our mistakes.

In a lighter vein, here’s an old baseball yarn that sums up the challenge of dealing with the Power Structure of a Wareham town Meeting:

It’s the week before the annual baseball rivalry between Heaven and hell and. as they have for years. St Peter and Satan meet informally to talk about logistics. After they’d resolved the details St Peter, with a friendly twinkle of the eye, couldn’t resist a teasing remark. “It must be daunting for you to be facing a team that has players like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Ted Williams. “Satan comes right back,  “Pete, It’s not a problem. . .You guys got all those stars but we got all the umpires.”

Both yesterday and today would not have been possible without the GPS. I didn’t have to worry if I was on lap # 12. . .or is it #11? Each second all day long the GPS kept up its flow of information to the favorite satellite it hd identified at the start of the day making it possible for me not to worry about record keeping.

Each da I am out thre I am reminded how fortunate I was to have been given the gear that has kept me dry and warm: the super spray skirt that John Fine of Wareham’s “Go Banannas” Army and navy Store gave me and the extraordinary good fortune of the offer from Lili Colby of MTI to “suit me up with the best”. It IS the best. What I had was ok for October but not for December.

Monday: There is only one word needed to describe my paddling experience today but that one word needs to be pronounced in a special way for full undrestanding: BOR-ing!!!

It was like the old phrase “a choice bertween rotten apples”. The wind on the Bay made the prospect of going out into it in my wee bat have all the appeal of diving into a giant Cuisinart food processor. The Boring Alternative actually had a lot of appeal.

I’ve “done laps” in these past few weeks but they were, for the most part, a mile or more long so they offered a change of scenery and wildlife. What  I did today was sort of like training for the Boston marathon by doing laps around the dining room table!

Lees were hard to come by. If it hadn’t been for an especially crooked part of Crooked River, today would have been a wipe out. When you see the GPS print-out you’ll understand why today was a real test of my resolve to pile up mileage even on lousy days.

My morning “chores” are normally a nice way to begin the day, but a lot of fum is lost when I feel the pressure of time. It’s especially frustrating when I see flat water on the bay as I’m walking Sereia along the shore just after dawn, or as I glance in that direction later as I’m tending my poultry, and then have the wind pick up just as I’m getting into my paddling clothes. “Darn!. . .I’ve missed two hours of easy paddling!”

Yesterday was an exception The light breeze of the early morning actually lessened as the day wore on. What wind there was came from the Northwest, which when translated into paddle talk means, “Head for the Weweantic.”

The tide was ebbing but the ideal currents vary in strength in any bay or river. The current is strongest in the deepest part of any channel and weakest near the shore, and if you look at my daily trips you can tell when I am avoiding current (and wind) and  when I’m taking advantage of one or the other. . .or both as I whizzed back “downhill”  from my visit to “River Otter Lagoon” near the Weweantic Dam right down the middle of the Weweantic with a nice boost from the last hour of a strong ebb tide. A great ride.

I succumbed to the lure of flat water along the Great HIll shore and followed along both sides of the Great HIll oenninsula. zi had a first close-up experience with a flock f seven Long Tail ducks. Normally they “spook” when I get closer than 100 yards. These guys. . .actually 6 “guy” and one “girl”. . .let me drift to within 8 yeards of them. They were behaving like goofy kids in their early teens so absorbed in showing off their “drop dead gorgeous” winter plumage to a female who looked dowdy to me but not to them. My camera! I fumbled for it in my jacket and they still didn’t fly away. Unreal. I got the camera out and started shooting picture after picture. .. but the trouble was that the powerful sun behind me turned my viewer into a mirror so I just hvet to hope taht I got the ducks.

But the real snag was that I hadn’t dared to take the time to work my hands out of my neoprene gloves so my attempt at the zoom button failed.

Instead of a remarkable close ups of the most dazzling winter plumage on any bird on the Atlantic Coast I have the kind of shot that makes them appear to be much further away than they were.

So it turned into a you-had-to-be-there moment. Today’s mileage is a secret known only to my trusty GPS but my rough guess is that we’re now past the 850 mark. . .In a world of perfect weather and no conflicts with on-shore obligations the 1000 mile mark is only 7 days away. We all know it won’t work out that way but we’re closing in on finishing up my side of the baragain. The other side is up to you. What I’m doing is all about The Wareham Free Library which needs your support now more than ever. Financial support is an important part of your commitment; another is that you should become part of our movement toward a better Wareham. . .a Wareham whose leaders have vision themselves but also posess the combination of wisdom and humility to seek input from the citizenry. It would be nice to be able to have the hope that those in office now will realize that the Moody’s rating that they link to the Town’s piggy bank” is actually more related to quality of life items: schools and libraries, for example. Wareham will be judged for a Moody rating as a family would be judged if they had wds of cash stashed under a matress. ..cash that they were able to accumulate because they fed dog food to their kids. A Moody’s rating is essentially a response to the question “Why should I move to Wareham?” A Moody’s ratin will weigh the argument that we are too poor to support a certified library against the documented fact that wareham citizens spent twenty six million dollars on lottery and scratch tickets last year. That’s $1300 dollars for every man, woman and child in Wareham. Yet we can’t afford a fully fucntionning library or fully funded schools.

Si I hopped into my kayack and headed right. Three hundred yards later the flat water of the cove leading into Crooked River said “Paddle me!”. . .so I did. . .again. . .and again. . .and again and again. For two hours I up and backed the aptly named Crooked River. The 15 Canada Geese that frequent the place weren’t alarmed and let me paddle quite close to them. . .as long as I kept moving; if I rested my paddle and began the process of picture taking, they reacted as if I was planning to pull a 12 gauge shotgun out of the pocket of my anorak and flew away. The Brant Geese. .. all 43 of them. . .acted as if they knew I was a displaced Inuit sneaking up for the kill, and spooked every time I got within 100 yards.

After two hours boredom and wind reduction made a cruise up The Agawam seem like a good idea. And it was. I continue to be amazed at the number of spots on the winding route to the bridge over The Agawam just south of Nessarella’s farm Stand that are as if wilderness areas. Please, Wareham, keep it that way.

Yesterday I spoke of the interesting term “wreck” for blown ashore dovekies. My “term of the day” is “raft”. There’s a raft of Buffleheads in Tempest Knob Bay. The first buffleheads I sawwere small family groups, but now we have reunions of these guys that make them seem from several hundred yrds away as if one solid mass. Thus the term “raft”. There is no better sign that Winter is coming than to see a raft of ducks. It’s not just Buffleheads: the Brant are rafting, the Canade Geese are rafting abd the Black Ducks are getting closer.

There’s a bird I see every day in every part of “my world” that I haven;t mentioned, and I don’t know why. . The Kingfisher. We don’t think of them as salt water birds but they really are. I’ve never seen one on Stoney Point Dyke but from the upper reaches of the Weweantic all the way ariound Wareham Bay and Onset Bay and Onset Bay and Buttermilk Bay, I never go more than a quarter of a mile without seeing a Kingfisher at work. They are very territorial. I’ve never seen two Kingfishers in the same place; one seems to “own” a vantage point from which he launches out and plunges t catch another minnow. Obviously some of the Kingfishers must be Queenfishers, and they must have a special truce in the Spring that explains why we still have solitary Kingfishers.