Newtowne Neck
This past week we spent several days canoeing and camping in the Breton Bay and lower Potomac River area. I will try to capture our trip in detail in the event that we would revisit this place sometime down the road, or to make it easy for any of you out there looking for a short three day canoe or kayak trip. Figuring out the logistics for any trip is often the most difficult part, and to not write them down would be akin to making a garden out of a brushy area one year and then letting it grow up in weeds the next. The second trip is always easier.
Jenelle is the super organizer! She gets the credit for figuring out the logistics for most of our trips. And she likes doing it! I like to think that we make a good team. I have big dreams and she has the ability to organize everything and make it happen.
We really wanted to do some sort of multi-day canoe trip this year, but our summer already seemed really full with the kids being involved in different camps and events along with the usual family reunions and get togethers and such. Minnesota or canoeing in the Adirondacks would have been a loftier goal, but to travel far seemed out of the question. So we did some searching and Jenelle discovered a newly established state park close to Leonardtown, MD.
Newtowne Neck State Park is a big peninsula with several primitive campsites for paddle-in campers only. It juts out into the lower Potomac river and is across the Breton Bay from Point Lookout. We actually made our reservations for the campsites through Point Lookout State Park. As we tried to figure out the logistics, we were feeling a little perplexed as the park service didn't feel overly helpful, only stating that we couldn't leave our car parked in the park or at any of the surrounding public boat launches overnight. My thought was to put-in and then I would move the car and just leave it along the road somewhere. I'm more of a fly by the seat of my pants kinda guy and hopefully the car would still be there with all of its parts when we returned. Jenelle likes to be more organized than that, so she dug around and found a Facebook group called Southern MD Paddlers or something like that and posed the question of where we could park. They were super helpful and they pointed us to Leonardtown Wharf Park. Jenelle emailed the park and they got back immediately. We were assured that our car wouldn't be towed if left there for several days and that it was used by other paddlers as well. The wharf is an easy find, just minutes off of highway 5 which runs to Point Lookout.
Monday morning we packed up our gear and canoes and headed out. Since we had had a busy week it took us a bit to get everything organized and loaded.
Have you ever noticed that when you pack things in a hurry, you often take way too much stuff but the important stuff gets left behind. We did pretty good this time, only forgetting Blake's hat and breading for frying fish and my cast iron griddle. It was also really nice to get to our first campsite and pull out our cooking pack and discover several extra camping cups, you know, the metal ones that take up space and make noise clunking around in your pack. No random strangers that showed up for coffee would leave thirsty! You never know in this day and age, who might show up, and it was good to know that we were prepared.
We got to the wharf around two in the afternoon and loaded our canoes and headed out. Caleb and I were in my smaller, fourteen and half foot canoe. We had most of the gear. Jenelle, Aiyana and Blake were in the eighteen foot tripper. Both canoes are cedar strip canoes that I built. We use the shorter one a lot for fishing and I can also use it as a solo canoe.
The longer one is actually the prototype for the Blackhawk canoe that is produced and can still be purchased from Savage River Works Inc. I was working for them when the canoe was introduced back in 1997. The owner, John Diller, is one of the best designers and canoe builders in the trade. A lot of the canoes used in the professional flat water canoe races around the world are built and designed by him. John designed the Blackhawk and told me that if I paid for the material and built the prototype on my time it was mine. The prototypes are made from cedar strips and covered in clear fiberglass. They are absolutely beautiful. If the prototype is a keeper, they then make a mold and produce them in kevlar and graphite to sell to the public. Well the Blackhawk was a keeper and turned out to be an awesome tripping boat. I've had it on so many excursions over the years and would recommend it to any one that does any kind of distance or overnight flat water paddling. Of course I've had to re-fiberglass and do some fixing on mine from time to time but twenty five years of abuse is a lot for a wooden canoe.
Back to the canoe trip. After giving a couple of paddling instructions that nobody wanted to hear, and getting the "eye-roll", we headed out. We had some smallish waves and couple of bigger waves as we paddled out of the inlet and along the shore towards Newtowne Neck. We passed a lot of high dollar homes and docks with really big boats and nice boathouses. A grandmother and her boat full of kids all waved and one of the kids shouted out something about the who's from Whoville. I guess that was us and we were thankful to be a bunch of who’s on another adventure.
We kept checking our GPS and making sure that we were heading in the right direction. With the wind in our face it felt like it took forever, but finally we reached the peninsula. It was easily noticeable because of the absence of houses and docks on the shoreline. We were greeted by a lady and her dog and her toddler son. It didn't quite feel like the wilderness but being that the boy was totally butt naked, it did feel a bit like maybe we were in the Amazon or somewhere remote like that. We found our campsite and it looked perfect. We set up camp and cooked some supper. Nothing better than those packets of rice dinners that you just boil in water, along with the packets of precooked chicken, all heated and wrapped up in a tortilla. It's always one of our favorites. It didn't leave much time for fishing but I fished a little while the rest of the family played a card game. Since we were on the east side of the bay, we didn't have much of a sunset and so we hit the hay at dark.
The next morning Blake and I got up early to fish. The sunrise was most beautiful!
We were hoping to catch some stripers or something big but no luck. We did get into some white perch and brought a couple in for breakfast. On canoe trips I usually like having my cast iron griddle. The extra weight is worth it when it comes to making pancakes or frying fish. But I had forgotten it, along with the breadcrumbs and Old Bay seasoning that we love so well. And so our breakfast wasn't as good as usual, but somehow we survived and had enough to make it through the day. We tore down our camp and made sure everything looked great, or as I tell the kids, better than we found it. These primitive sites are "leave no trace" camping only, which pretty much means what it says. With everyone getting outdoors the last several years, " leave no trace" camping in the public areas is more important than ever!
We headed down around the peninsula. For those of you that wish to copy our trip, here is a logistic that you may want to jot down. There is a day use beach and port-a-potty at the very southern tip of the peninsula. For those of you that haven't learned the golden rules for relieving yourself in the wild, this is an option. After stopping and taking in the comforts of the port-a-potty, we headed north on the western side of the peninsula. As we were paddling we started having some fun and bumping in to each other. And then we started racing. I was shouting out the one, two, three, switch. One, two, three, switch. Getting everyone in unison. Kind of between us and towards the front of the canoes, appeared a fin. We stopped paddling. Shark! Shark? Jenelle and Caleb saw the body. We were pretty sure it was a shark. When we got to the next point, we saw a fisherman and asked him if there were sharks in the bay. He had never seen one but knew someone that had caught one.
We paddled on to our next campsite. It wasn't quite as nice as the first one but less used. We found some trees and hung our hammocks and rested a bit. We also found a trail that led to a road that led to the original monastery that sold the property to the State. There is still a Catholic church there that is being used and we were greeted with ringing church bells. As it was in the middle of the week, everything was closed and the water that we hoped to find there, was not to be found.
A side note. When traveling in salt water, you'll need to carry your own fresh water, as the normal water filters don't work well for removing salt. We took the normal ration of two quarts of water per person per day. We wished we had taken a little more, as it was hot!
As we headed back to our camp, we picked blackberries along the way. We also saw several deer coming out into the wheat fields to eat. We got back to our campsite and followed along with making a supper. Tonight's dinner was hamburger that we had fried at home and brought along and reheated along with cheese and other goodies and rice that we added to tortillas and again we had our tortilla supper, but one with different ingredients.
After supper and cleaning up, Jenelle and the kids played some card games while I took the canoe out and fished. I ran into a big school of white perch and the fishing was really fun. It seemed like for several minutes almost every cast caught a perch. These were nice sized perch, maybe ten or eleven inches. I threw them all back as it was really hot out and we didn't have anywhere to keep them through the night for breakfast.
As we were on the west coast of the peninsula the evening was quite beautiful with sunset that threw different shades of color across the water and the skyline.
The next morning we got up and looked at the weather and it looked like storms would be rolling in and so we thought it would be best if we just ate our breakfast and then packed up and headed out and so that's what we did. We boiled some water from the bay to mix with our oatmeal to save our drinking water. Not a good idea! We probably won't do that again.
We packed up and headed out. The wind was already picking up but once we got around the southern tip, the tailwind really helped us out.
Our original plan was to stop at a place called Fitzy's for lunch. It's a little bit north of the park about half way to Leonardtown. It sits along the water and looked like a good stop. Then we would head back to the Leonardtown Wharf and get our car and head on home. Since the storms were rolling in and it looked like we could get caught on some bigger waves we thought it best if we skipped out on the Fitzy's and just got back to the car. And that's what we did. After loading everything onto our car we stopped and ate at the Leonardtown Grille. As it often is, that first food off of the water is downright good, especially after a breakfast of salty oatmeal. We started out with a little bit of crab dip and then we followed up with our different meals of choice and of course I had the mushroom burger and a glass of Coke and lots of glasses of water. As we headed home we talked about the trip and remembered the shark. Jenelle looked it up, and yes there were sharks in Breton Bay. There were videos of sharks swimming by the docks of the swanky homes. There was a picture of a bull shark that someone had caught that weighed over three hundred pounds! And so yes, we're telling people that we saw a shark.
It was a memorable trip, one that we would hope to do again someday. If you're a paddler and feel the urge for an overnight canoe trip, try it. If you don’t have your own canoe or kayak, you can rent one at the Leonardtown Wharf.
Take lots of water, paddle hard, and if someone asks if you’d like your oatmeal salted, just say, “no!”
