Post Labor Day Adventures

While everyone else slept late in our tents, I wandered from one empty campsite to the next, collecting from their dusty fire rings the charred remains of the previous weekend. I dropped the armful of half-burned logs next to our own pit, raked the morning coals back into a glowing hub and soon a new fire crackled, warming my shins on this cool September morning.
With Labor Day over, I was able to rummage through at least a dozen vacant sites last weekend at Burlingame, the popular coastline campground in Charlestown, Rhode Island. It certainly wasn't empty, but we still knew that the "first-come-first-serve" policy wouldn't make finding a site all that difficult, despite our arriving at dinnertime on a Friday night.
School may be back in session, but it's still hard to understand why these places are deserted for the last weekends of summer. The full-mooned nights are crisp and bugless. The days are breezy and bright. Beach parking is free while the surf retains all the heat that beamed down throughout July and August. And, of course, the entire coast is bubbling with fish.
The name "Miscuamicut" has a Native American meaning of "Red Salmon at this Place," a translation that only backed up my friend Shane Calamo’s prediction that we'd regret not having our rods on this trip. Just a couple of weeks earlier, the tuna Shane caught off Montauk was on our dinner table. There are still several more meals from that catch in my freezer. If anyone could pull off a big catch here, it would be Shane.
But we came to Westerly to kayak. We launched behind Weekapaug Bait and Tackle, where a quiet water laps the sand. It was two hours past high tide, which left a large, dead striper behind, picked to the bones by birds and crabs. We glided over the calm water of the inlet, under a small bridge and into the churning breachway, just yards from the rocks where my wife caught her first flounder a few summers back. There was a smell of rotting fish here, too, and through the green blur of water we saw the white flesh of another striper laying on the floor of the breachway.
We turned left and paddled inland. The receding tide forced a strong current through the channel, which was constructed over fifty years ago to connect Winnapaug Pond to the open ocean. We paddled hard to fight the water; any halt in our propulsion and we lost ground immediately.
Where the breachway meets Winnapaug, we noticed a flyfisherman casting from a kayak, steadied in the calm water of a cut in the bank. The current didn’t subside for several hundred more yards, and when it did, the wind took its place as it raced over the open surface of the pond.
Winnipaug Pond, like neighboring Quonochontaug Pond, is a large, shallow pool of salt water held by the reefs on its shores. With 2,738 acres of clean, green water- sometimes clear to the bottom- Winnapaug attracts paddlers and anglers alike.
As shallow as Winnapaug gets (my paddle never reached deeper than halfway), it is still full of life. At the center of the pond, stacked aquaculture trays for harvesting clams and oysters reached high above the water’s surface.
Aside from fish, we watched a variety of birds, getting within just a few boat lengths of nearly a hundred double-crested cormorants. Dozens of great egrets dotted the shore, while at the grassy edge of the pond, I paddled within a few feet of a lesser yellowlegs poking around in the brush.
In January 2005, Winnipaug Pond was an exciting destination for local naturalists, who were amazed to see an American white pelican, which normally winter in tropical regions. The bird, which can have a wingspan of up to nine feet, was soon joined by a seal, another rare sighting for Winnapaug Pond.
With the wind now at our backs, we cruised into the breachway. Instead of the current, we now battled the wakes of fishing boats returning from the ocean. I noticed something on shore and got Shane’s attention. I pointed to a kid standing alongside the channel. A good sized striper was wagging in his hand. I wondered what the day would have brought had we packed our rods. Either way, the lap around Winnapaug was rewarding in itself.
Afterwards, we met up with the rest of our group at the beach, where I pulled off my shirt and walked out into the warm surf. I knew it would be my last ocean swim of the year, but wondered if it really had to be.