Monday, October 15, 2007

Fall Paddling...

Pony Truss Bridge over the Musconetcong River, one of only two in New Jersey and listed as a National Historic structure.


Today is American Rivers Blog Action Day, which they say is "uniting bloggers from around the world to put one important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment."

Nearly 9,000 bloggers - with an audience reach of 6.5 million subscribers - are blogging about rivers today, so they say.

October through March is when we like to paddle the smaller creeks and rivers. Right now most are still too low but November usually brings a fair amount of rain to bring the flows back up.

In an earlier post I erroneously stated that this year is the Five-year/five-foot drawdown of Lake Hopatcong, which brings steady flows to the Musconetcong River. However, upon checking with Cliff Lundin (former Mayor of Hopatcong and Musconecong Watershed Assoc. Trustee) the five-year drawdown won't happen until 2008. He said "Regular 26 inch drawdown starts Nov 1. It goes at the higher outflow rate until its down 26. Next year is the big one. 60 inch drawdown starts after Labor Day."

OK paddling buds, help me remember that. LABOR DAY '08. This year is only 26" and Cliff tells me that with the drought the lake is already down 7 inches. It won't take long to go down the remaining 19 inches unless we get a big storm. Still, let's remain optimistic that November will be an average precipitation month and if that is the case we'll have many happy, albeit chilly days of creek and small river paddling in store.