A bikeyaking adventure through Mystic

The bikeyak at the launch site in Old Mystic

A note on doorstep adventures:

  You are about to read another entry in my Doorstep Adventure portfolio.

  The concept is simple: Start the adventure at your door; finish the adventure at your door. 

   By the way, you're not allowed to use cars, planes or any other vehicles that burn fuel. In a world threatened by climate change, I'm not content to be another “nature-lover” jetting around the planet, trailing carbon emissions in my wake.

  Doorstep adventuring is a lot harder than regular adventuring, and it ain't always fun. A doorstep adventurer may start an alpine trip with a 20-mile bike ride, skis or snowshoes strapped to the frame. Kayak voyages require even more inventiveness

In any of these cases, If you are willing to accept the demands, the reward of arriving at last is multitudes more satisfying.

   In an era when you can access virtually any place on earth in relatively short order, it’s no longer the challenge of getting there that matters. What matters is how you get there.

Pedaling

The driver in the pickup swooped in on a blind curve and mashed down on the accelerator. I glued my eyes to the edge of the pavement, gripped the bike handlebars tight. I felt a little vulnerable with a 16-foot kayak trailering behind.

I planned to pedal the four miles from home down to the nearest coastal access, paddle for a couple hours and then get back on the bike to bring it all back. 

It was the first time I had tried biking with a sea kayak (I have biked with a shorter whitewater boat.) If I made it to the launch, I would have the satisfaction of moving my boat over land while leaving my polluting car in the driveway.

But I had to get through Lantern Hill Road first.

Designed without even the fleeting comfort of a painted margin, Lantern Hill Road once served the needs of a what was a sleepy rural community in southeastern Connecticut. Now, it is a corridor between Mystic tourism, Interstate 95 and one of the world’s largest casinos. There are also a lot of asshole drivers. I can’t say that the profusion of Fireball nip bottles littering the roadside has instilled much confidence either.

The thing was, I couldn’t move all the way over. The aluminum kayak carriage provided decent tracking, inflatable tires that could take a bump, and good balance — but it also gave me a wider profile that forced me to ride closer to traffic.

If I veered too far to the right, I risked hitting rocks or brush, and flopping out on asphalt.

Another thing to consider: visibility. I have a six-foot profile riding on my bike, but my kayak was a third of that. A driver coming up a rise could miss it easily.

Measures that I’d taken to prevent my boat from becoming another roadside statistic included clipping a bright yellow dry bag to the back, and stringing yellow line over the small “mast” that I’d rigged up using half of my spare paddle. An orange fishing glove at the top stood out like a Day-Glo rooster’s comb.

This was apparently visible enough, to the truck coming up behind me, which swerved wide. I slowed down to a mile an hour to let it blow past. The driver had maybe half a second to react if there were a vehicle coming around the curve from the other direction. 

Exhale.

With the engine noise past me, I could hear spring peepers chirruping from a nearby wetland. I rode at the speed of a 5K jogger, alongside stone walls and soggy corn fields, scarcely minding the burden behind me rear wheel. That was until I heard the next engine bearing down.

Much of road riding went this way: pastoral contemplation interspersed by sphincter-clenching moments.

I’d learned to keep my momentum for the uphills, or else the rig tended to wobble, then fishtail violently and force a dismount. The busy Gold Star Highway intersection was on an uphill as it happened, but I was blessed with a rare gap in traffic. I blew through the red flashing light, climbed up to North Stonington Road and cruised the rest of the way to Old Mystic. After one more tricky intersection I rolled up to the put-in off Route 27.

The start of the Mystic River at high tide

Paddling

The Mystic River starts where the dark water of Whitford Brook burbles through stone walls to a tidal marsh. I pulled the bikeyak into a small parking lot adjoining a brick building that used to be a flag mill.

The tide was out. By that time that I had locked up the bike and unstrapped the kayak, which I had to lower almost four feet down fieldstone wall to reach the lazy-flowing water. 

This was not the typical place where I would launch a kayak in this area, as I would usually drive out to more open water in Long Island Sound. Today, I appreciated drifting languidly between the sedges. Geese and ducks meandered along the surface. Up higher, on a wooden platform, an osprey tended to its nest. Despite the tidal influence, the spring runoff from Whitford made the water taste completely fresh. Even as the river bloated out to a quarter mile wide, I could barely taste the salt intruding from the ocean.

The water had turned deeper and saltier by the time I passed beneath the I-95 bridge. A stiff south wind rose up to challenge me. I slunk away from the confrontation, slipping into unruffled water behind points of land.

I glided past wooden ships at Mystic Seaport with apprentices in the rigging, past winterized yachts still under tarps and beneath the drawbridge that connects Downtown Mystic. I had plenty of winter rust to shake from my paddle rhythm. My focus was less on the scenery, more on getting my body synched up properly as I scooted past all the familiar landmarks.

Mason’s Island at the river mouth gave me the choice of heading east or west. I chose east and was soon glad for it. First, I saw another osprey landing near its nest. I think it was feeding chicks.

Passing Dodges Island, I got a real treat when I flashed on a large, shiny object sitting on a rock.

Hey, isn’t that a —

Too late. The seal splashed into the water.

About a minute later, however, I saw about a dozen of the harbor seals, gurgling and growling at each other on a cluster of nearby boulders. I kept my distance this time, so they wouldn’t take to the water. They were just a group of sausage forms in my field of vision, but the satisfaction of the find was immense. I had seen seals many times before out on Fishers Island, just south of the border of the New York State border, but it was the first time I’d seen more than one seal in Connecticut waters.

Now that I was out on open water, the hazy shore of Fishers was in reach if I wanted to push myself. Even farther, to the east, lay Napatree Point in Rhode Island, where I might have wrangled a surf spot out of the open ocean exposure.

Yet, my bike was still in Old Mystic and I was already burning the afternoon. Maybe I shouldn’t get too cocky. I skipped the long crossing to Fishers and paddled east instead, following the Stonington shoreline for a couple miles until I managed to wrangle a weird little surf spot in front of somebody’s multi-million dollar mansion. 

The waves in Fishers Island Sound rose only six-inches or so, but there was a thin stone ledge that refracted them into each other and boosted their height—similar to how a magnifying glass turns up the heat of the sun. In that narrow zone, the waves built to a couple feet high, then curled over into a small but fun break.

I angled in from the left, caught a quick diagonal down the face of a wave and squirted out the other side before it could crash me into the rocks on shore. 

The second time I set up, there was a larger wave approaching the magnifying glass. I accelerated as the wave grew, pushed me sideways and then crashed over the boat up to my armpits. I braced my paddle into the whitewater, then spun out of the carnage. A gallon or so of water had slopped onto my shirt from beneath my raincoat. Hadn’t seen that one coming. 

I briefly regretted leaving my drysuit at home, but the air was warm enough that the chill passed quickly. It was about time to head back.

I poked into a couple of coves, then rode the flooding tide and tailwind back to Old Mystic. The high tide gave me license to paddle up Whitford Brook a short ways before I started hitting rocks. It also allowed me to get out of my boat much more easily than I had gotten in, as the water was now much closer to the top of the stone wall.

It took another half hour to move from kayak cockpit to bicycle seat, re-rigging the trailer and changing my clothes. The lowering sun inspired me to also turn my headlamp backwards and set it on blinker.

The ride home was a smooth one and by the time I’d finished, I still had enough energy left in the can. I suppose I could have paddled out to Fishers after all, but no matter. I’d proved that I could do it.

Moving a sea kayak overland has always felt like the moon-shot of my doorstep adventuring. I’ve usually conceded, reluctantly, that it really is so much easier to throw the boat on the roof and let the car do the work, you know, the way everyone else does it.

Yet here I had taken on that challenge and still managed to get a quality outing with surf and seals. I had grossed about 16-miles of kayaking all together. Biking the kayak was more work than it would have been to drive, but it wasn’t so onerous that it defined the experience. The paddling did that.

Foam from Whitford Brook gathers at the start of the Mystic River