Adventure of a Lifetime

In the summer of 2016, my friend and I set off on the greatest nautical adventure we could have ever devised. Our homes were situated along the Perkiomen Creek about 9 miles from the point where it becomes tributary to the comparably monstrous Schuylkill River. This river flows through the northwestern suburbs of Philadelphia until meeting its demise: the Delaware River (a staple of American history classes). The Delaware runs between New Jersey and the Philadelphia-Delaware borders, until opening into the Delaware Bay and exiting to the Atlantic Ocean at Cape May Point, NJ. Water travels roughly 144 miles from our homes to Cape May, and it was our goal to learn the life of these molecules.

In order to better stabilize the canoe provided to us from an older adventurer, we used some PVC donated to us by some inspired Home Depot employees to build an outrigger. We educated ourselves on the various strokes and their purposes. We created an enormous map detailing the minutia of our sleeping venues, portaging locations, and landmarks for familiarity. We practiced on numerous occasions for hours in a stretch of water within Valley Forge National Historical Park. But nothing could have quite prepared us for the six-day journey. We encountered storms, islands swarming with vicious birds of prey, five run-ins with law enforcement, a brief and accidental career in aqua-terrorism, hypothermic scares, wakes from ships soaring higher than the airplanes barely passing over our heads, and that trademark dull yet incessant pain.

On day 1, we explored the frustrating world of friction: the Perkiomen Creek is only 1-2 feet deep, so it was a wet-shoe day. We had to circumvent 4 dams on this day. At the third, we had to narrowly avoid a branta goose who was guarding its dammed territory. We camped on Peter's Island after a 30+ mile day fearful of our early fatigue.

Day 2 began with an early-morning interaction with all of the professionally-dressed aquatic athletes, who mocked our slapdash setup. We stopped by the Philadelphia Museum of Art to portage our last dam, spending about an hour and a half transporting our stuff half a mile downstream, lowering all of it down an 8-foot precipice with ropes, aiding an elderly woman who randomly fell in front our belongings, and convincing the emergency services that we were not suicidal despite having canoed well past the "DO NOT TRAVEL PAST THIS POINT" sign before the large dam. We got approached again when resting at a picnic table situated on the property of a company who wished for anyone but picnickers. We managed to find some common-ground with the security guard, Doug, who eventually felt fondly enough of our adventure to give us some detailed directions of how to navigate the remainder of the Schuylkill and beginning of the Delaware. We learned that large ships have wake-dampening technology, while medium cruisers have no such restraint. We finally reached our sleeping grounds, a beautiful bluff littered with goose feathers, with enough time to enjoy the sunset and some candy.

Day 3, we departed from Ghost Goose Terrace for a linear trip down the Delaware, headed towards Pea Patch Island, the home to Fort Delaware. This day's travels were the first to seem monotonous, half because of the unchanging landscape, and otherwise due to the slow surface speed of the Delaware. Unfortunately, while the majority of the river flows downstream, the surface is much more heavily influenced by wind, tides, and its desire to be generally unhelpful to its small-bodied canoeists. However, this day proved to be the shortest of the trip. We sprinted to the shores of Pea Patch only to discover an ungodly screeching of thousands of mating birds of prey. Armed with our paddles, we tiptoed to the treeline, noticing large swaths of white below the expansive nests of these birds. We slept in fear of another avian attack, but we somehow survived. Perhaps it was the fire that Jeff managed to light.

Day 4 we left for an early morning, set to cover as much ground as humanly possible, as our original plan required us to finish by Day 5. Shortly into our first excursion, we were greeted with thunderous sounds, and soon thunderous sights. We only really began to panic upon the thunderous rain. We scrambled to the Fort Elfsborg Beach parking lot, where we set up a sad tarp and waited for hours for the rain to loosen up. It was here that we were greeted by the scowls of many elderly natives, whose disappointment in our presence beckoned the police to inquire about our motives. Denying their invitation to partake in donut hour at the police department, we deconstructed our shelter and pressed onwards. It was at this point that I felt unspeakably cold, having no clothes that didn't scream "summer beach party". We soon passed by a nuclear power plant, and continued for another hour before deciding to stop. Immediately upon landing, we were met by a large figure trailblazing through the tall brush and armed with a semi-automatic, fully-loaded gun. He boomed, "Excuse me! Are you aware that you are trespassing on state power plant property?" Slightly horrified yet reminiscent of all of our previous encounters with law enforcement, we denied possessing any weapons, and convinced them to set us free from our lives of aqua-terrorism. They only let us depart after ensuring they would not be held liable for any future injuries that might occur to us. Because of our slow canoeing pace and terrible series of events that day, I had already deemed Day 4 as the worst day of my life, and it was only 4:00pm. We broke our silence to admit that we would need another 24 hours, and we broke our ambitions by researching a place to sleep. We landed on a sand-fly infested strip of land, littered with sedimentary rocks and crusted, brittle sticks that complicated our tenting process. I decided to end the worst day of life as quickly as possible.

Day 5 is still known as the worst day of my life--somehow surpassing the day before. How? Hours of open water, periodically checkpointed by the arrival of peninsulas that only revealed further peninsulas, started our day strong. But our pace along the surface current (which just had to be going upstream) was frustrating. It took 3/4 of the day to finally crest over a huge system of peninsulas, revealing the last stop before entering the Delaware Bay. This last stop would be our sleeping grounds. It seemed routine: crest over the corner, and take a direct path across Nantuxent Cove to the landing point. But having approached a wholly new section of waters, we were immediately greeted by an aggressive tide, dragging us directly backwards onto the land we had just crested. The waves we encountered exceeded 6 feet in height, slapping the bow of our canoe below the surface for enough time to be taking on a worrisome amount of water. We had little time to bail while fighting this force. The best way I can describe our 1.5 hour effort was an arm-sprint lasting a marathon. We fought a prolonged fight until giving in to resting on some intermediary land. We hardly achieved the rest we deserved and craved, as the land was entirely composed of deciduous material that acted more like cotton candy than a solid foundation. There was no way we could stop here even briefly, let alone overnight, so our only choice was to return to the tumultuous current. Jeff called his mother to notify her of our vulnerability, closing their conversation with "if we do not call in 90 minutes, something bad has happened and you should call the Coast Guard." Needless to say, the Coast Guard was already lacing-up the minute that call ended. We returned to the water and fought with all of our energy, straining every muscle to push our little canoe further along this unbearable terrain. Exactly 87 minutes later, we sighed at having finally caressed the sands of Nantuxent Point. The inescapable boredom concatenated with immeasurable suffering were enough to declare a new worst day of my life, and bedtime could not have arrived any sooner. While we were excited to have reached our final rest-stop before Cape May, we both took huge insult to having to wake up in 6 hours to start it all over again.

There are no pictures of Day 6, because our non-waterproof camera had become inundated with sand stuck in its gears. All I can say is hours of open-sun and zero terrestrial breaks provided anything but excitement. The occasional sight of a new water tower gave us hope that were seeing parts of Cape May, but we were usually not. However, a pack of dolphins playfully passed our vessel to welcome us into definitive sight of Cape May around 3:00pm. Filled with elation by spotting our finish line, we celebrated. Jeff called his mother to have her start driving to come pick us up, and we sprinted towards the beaches. We passed a few of Cape May's jetties in order to get better access to the parking lot, but few can imagine the misery preparing to set in for our hubris. The water became turbulent; our gunwale appeared strangely close to the water's surface; our feet became damp; and the white interior of the canoe evolved into a grimy blue. In just seconds, everything had evacuated, including us. Jeff watched as every item spread radially from the capsized vessel, and scurried to save it all. I blindly grasped for the canoe, feeling safer to be holding the thing that had brought us so far already. We worked to retrieve as many of our belongings as possible, but ultimately lost all of our clothes, phones, and wallets. Six lifeguards came to our rescue, and brought us and our few retrieved items back to shore. To have come all this way just to be surfed the remaining tenth of a mile to Cape May was embarrassing and incredibly unnerving. We had passed the first instance of a finish line with arrogance, but this realization came all too late. All of the images shown above were developed by the fine workers at Walgreens, who somehow salvaged the waterlogged film.