Shrewsbury River
by Betty Wiest

Sunday, September 11, 2016

There are no pictures due to camera failure.

We had ten members and one guest (George, Christine, Monica, Lee, Tina, Jim, Chris, Mike, Andy, me and Sydney).

It was a beautiful sunny, but windy day which affected our paddling. It's always a wonderful feeling to have the wind at your back, but it's not so nice when you have to paddle into the wind on the return. We managed to do pretty well until the last section of the river when I noticed the water was fairly wicked. We managed to paddle into a protected area, portage our boats through thirty feet of phragmites to discover we were at the opposite end of the road where our vehicles were parked. A quarter-mile walk gave us our land legs back. Christine, George and Andy decided to paddle the rough water and got back just as we arrived to retrieve our vehicles.

During our paddle we passed two paddle boarders testing their skill as well as a few power boats out for a Sunday excursion. Probably the most noticeable item was the hundreds of dead moss bunker silver fish floating in the river (thanks to Andy for his research as to what they were).

We had a brown bag lunch at a local park on the same street that faced the river/bay area.

A few of us went to Monmouth Racetrack afterward, just a few minutes from the river….I was the big winner with $4.60 in winnings.

Betty