North Hero in the morning
Sometime during the night, the wind shifted to come out of the south, and the air started to warm up noticeably. When we woke up, all signs pointed to a fine day, although Jim pointed out that it still involved dealing with a large lake, which he was not fond of. We all coffeed up and threw some food down our throats, and were soon packed and ready to disembark from Knight Island.
Tommy headed towards Dameas Island
Winds seemed manageable, so we again got a wild hair about us and decided to beeline straight for Kings Bay rather than taking the more direct approach across to Carrying Place. This involved an open water crossing of about 4 miles. We paddled along the side of Dameas Island and then entered the watery no-man’s land between our last camp and North Hero Island.
Mike under Mackerel Skies
The southerly wind steadily increased as we paddled, and by the time we reached Kings Bay we were catching some surf rides on two foot-plus rollers. We took a short break on shore to stretch legs, and then paddled across the bay to Holiday Point, where we again got out to stretch and snack a bit. By this time, the wind was kicking up some good whitecaps into the point. Fortunately, past Holiday Point we had a good wind block and had easy conditions the rest of the way. We stopped again at a public boat access and had some lunch. Jim filled up his water bottles at the water treatment plant located there.
Yes, there ARE glassy conditions on Lake Champlain
We continued to Stephenson Point, and when we rounded that point we found our first “glassy” conditions of our journey. Right after that, we found a road access that we thought might be the place to camp, but a couple local hunters who showed up with the makings of a duck blind gave us directions to keep paddling around Stony Point to look for another road access. A quick paddle around the other side of the point found us at the trail leading 500 feet back into the closed loop of North Hero State Park that is now used for primitive camping for paddlers.
This campsite was basically created out of a swamp, so it is no wonder it has a reputation for voracious mosquitoes, a reputation we found to be well deserved.
An Eastern Redbellied Snake
It would be much improved if they would at least install a privy, or open up the bath houses, but we’ve done primitive before so it was no big deal. We at least had picnic tables and a fire ring. We set up the tents, had some beer and snacks, and roamed around the abandoned campground. Occasionally, cars would drive by, presumably driven by hunters or birdwatchers or, perhaps, axe murderers. We found a neat nature trail with some enormous shagbark hickories and a distinct lack of wildlife, save for the aforementioned mosquitoes. On the way back to the campsite, Jim spotted the first Eastern Redbellied Snake I’ve ever seen.
The path to the water
It was much warmer this night than the previous night, and it was nice hanging around the campfire without worrying about hypothermia. We had a discussion about the open water crossings, and voiced our personal concerns that, should something happen to one of us out in the middle of the lake, could the others do anything to help? Any conditions bad enough to flip an open boat would not make it easy to re-enter or bail out that boat. We agreed that we’d basically be screwed if something bad happened, and that the best we could hope for was working to get the paddler out of the water, and hope we had good enough cell coverage to call for help.
With that sobering thought, we eventually drifted off to our tents one by one for a good nights sleep.
Total mileage for the day: 9.0 miles
Sunset over Dillenbeck Bay
