This past Tuesday we had a paddle with 18 Tuesday Groupers out to the Nansemond River where we found a nice sandy beach to have our lunch. We started out at Bennett’s Creek Park where we all met and by 9:40 we were on our way paddling against the tide. The tide was low at 7:30 and this made it a little harder to paddle out and as we started back towards the takeout the tide had changed and was flowing out against us again, with a 10 MPH south wind. Beside the tide being against us the weather for the day was great and the breezes felt good, and this kept us cool most of the time.
We had 2 new people with us, one had come last week and the other one had never paddled with us and they both were good paddlers and kept up with everyone. I did stop 3 times so we all could take a break and let everyone catch-up, on the way out. We paddled under the Hwy. 17 Bridge, there on Bridge Road; it is named that because of the James River Bridge and 4 other smaller bridges in that area. We only saw egrets, and great blue heron with a lot of seagulls.
There were two things that we had this time that we had never seen before when we paddled from this takeout. First there were 2 boats loading lumber to build a boat dock over at Harbor View along the Nansemond River, taking up one whole boat ramp, but they were gone before we left. The other thing was 3 men in an Oyster Boat pulled up and unloaded about 29 bushels of Oyster they had pulled out of the water that morning before 9:00 A.M. Everyone tried to watch them unload but, but one man could have used a belt to hold up his paints, so most turned away till he was gone. You should be able to see all of this from Bill’s pictures down below.
I had brought 2 watermelons to cut up for everyone after the paddle and the first one went really good and everyone got at least one piece, then I cut into the second one and it was bad all the way through. It’s like what Forrest Gump said; “life and Watermelons are like a box of chocolates, you never know what you will get” You know that wasn’t the worst thing that happened on this trip, when we got to Bennett’s Creek Mkt. for ice cream, we found out their machine had broken that very morning, and they had no ice cream, but you know the Tuesday Group never turns back, so we walked over to the friendly 7/11 and we all got ice cream there. It was a very good paddle in spite of all the difficulty we had, and everyone enjoyed another paddle with the Tuesday Group. Bruce