Fear and Kayaking on Little Seneca Lake

I have been afraid of kayaks ever since my "baby" brother was nearly killed in a kayaking accident in high school.  
I have spent enough time living, playing, and traveling on water and have a healthy respect for the (literally) elemental force of water, and I deemed this type of craft as suspect (at best) or downright suicidal (at worst).  It's been quite a while since I imprinted that prejudice on my brain patters, though, and a recent pontoon boat excursion on Little Seneca Lake (near Germantown, MD, just over a half hour from home) made me challenge that prejudice and has launched a new obsession.

But those are stories for future posts.  Here are some images from the fabulous day we had this past Saturday that started the whole she-bang.

Pontoon Boat and Grumpy Tour Guide

The dock was pretty weird.  I had to think about it when Justin asked me how long it had been since I had been on the water, and it's been a long, long time... long enough that I had never seen what is probably *very* common now... docks made of that rigid plastic that they use to make kids' outdoor playthings and stuff.  I'm used to wood planks or metal mesh, but the feel of the floating gangway underfoot was pretty much the same, at least.  The boat was about the same size of my family's pontoon boat; ours may have been a bit wider, but about the same length.  Our boat was full of about twenty people, including several (noisy, rambunctious) children.  Jeepers. My kids would have been reeeeaaaalllly sorry if they had acted in public the way these did!  Of course, they were only a minor distraction, except to the tour guide, who was obviously straining not to be outright gruff with them (not to mention one grown man, who seemed to keep getting "caught" standing or moving while the tour guide/boat pilot didn't want us to do so.  

Anyway, most of this type of nonsense made me think I really didn't want to rely on guided boat trips for our explorations.  We set off to explore the small (505 acre) lake, and I kept my eye on the other craft sharing the water with us.  There were a few canoes, some rowboats, a fishing boat with an illegal (gas powered) motor, and kayaks.  Tandems and singles darted around us like skimming dragonflies, and the kayakers maneuvered themselves enthusiastically to take advantage of the small wake created by the lumbering pontoon, getting a little "surf" time on the calm lake.  I noted how close to the water the kayakers were, even compared to those in canoes.  I saw a few exceptionally large persons, some of whom looked like they didn't get an appreciable amount of exercise on any given day, propelling themselves around just fine with easy swings of double-ended paddles.  The tops of the kayaks weren't closed with skirts, and it almost looked more like you were sitting on top of the boat than inside of it.  I thought, "Huh. That really does NOT look as bad as I had imagined!"

Little Seneca Lake at its widest and near-deepest section, just off the marina and close to the dam.

We got underway, the pontoon boat loaded with so much weight it could only chug along, sounding a little wheezy.  The tour guide griped about this several times, and we could only conclude that he would rather be out without all these pesky tourists!  However, I was almost immediately gripped by such a nostalgic sense of deja vu -- between the sound of an inboard motor, swish of our wake as we slowed down between cruising (usually to view a turtle or look for herons or beavers), the emerald green yet still clear color of the water, the furred stumps beneath the water line and even poking up above, the feel of wind when we picked up some speed on the open spaces, and the magical, beckoning mystery of the small inlets and coves we could only approach and peer at from a distance -- I was overwhelmed with memories of my life growing up on Greers Ferry Lake in Arkansas.  And those coves...  I used to explore them, alone, as a child and teen, in my little pedal boat or the jon boat.  I wanted to go in there and show Justin the kinds of marvels I used to love finding in such places -- tiny fish in the shallows, nibbling at algae, moss, and insects; spiders defending their nests and hunting grounds on rocks near the edges (ok, so we had *real* spiders - chocolate tarantulas - in  AK, but they grown their wood spiders pretty good here in Maryland); turtles and woodpeckers; moss-covered rocks and beaver undercuts where you might spot watersnakes or larger fish; water skimmer bugs skating over the surface, daring the resident trout population to catch them.  And the magical, mystical, almost religious experience of finding these little gems of nature and having them all to yourselves... yep. No question about it.  I was gonna have to bite the bullet and learn not to fear the kayak.

This could have been taken at Greers Ferry, except that instead of rock cliffs, these shores are soft earth and quite green

No giant cliffs or X Tree Points, alas.

Soft shores, steep drop-offs, and lack of any emergency or S&R personnel (unless you count the MD mounted police, who have their horse training grounds along the shore of Little Seneca Lake) mean that there is no swimming allowed.  That's a bummer.

Sunning turtle.

I was thrilled to find that, despite the deterioration of my eyesight over the (ahem) couple of years since I spent weekends and summers at the lake, I can still spot wildlife before most people can home in on what I point to.  Justin did pretty well, too.  We saw a couple of turtles like this, sunning themselves on fallen logs.  Even so, no herons or cranes appeared, although we did see an osprey!

Entrance to one little inlet I want to explore!

We learned a little about the history of the lake, which sounded remarkably like the story of Greers Ferry -- only instead of the Army Corps of Engineers being in charge of the project, WSSC (Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission, the DC Metro area provider of public water utilities) built the dam on Little Seneca creek where it converges with Ten Mile Creek and Cabin Branch Creek.  The primary purpose was to create an emergency water supply source for the area, and it has, we were told, in fact been used as such twice in the reservoir's 30-year history.  For the record, the USACE created Greers Ferry, with its 50,000+ acres (and with official depths of nearly 200 feet, that means something like 10¹¹ gallons - yipes!) by constructing a concrete gravity dam that provides hydroelectric power, flood control, and also an emergency local water supply source.  Little Seneca's dam is a simple earthen berm, and has no hydroelectric capability.  Still and all, they're both flooded-valley lakes, which may be what gives them such striking similarities, even with the huge disparity in size.

Map of the lake.

So, our next free weekend, we are going to hightail it back up to the lake and get jiggy with some kayaks!  

              You can read more about Little Seneca Lake on Wikipedia:
                                           http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Seneca_Lake

                                       or on LakeLubber.com:
                                           http://www.lakelubbers.com/little-seneca-lake-549/

               or on the Montgomery Parks website (about Black Hills Park):
                                http://www.montgomeryparks.org/facilities/regional_parks/blackhill/

                           and of course, if you're interested in camping,
              check out Little Bennett campground, about ten minutes away. http://www.montgomeryparks.org/enterprise/park_facilities/little_bennett/little_bennett_campground.shtm