Eastern Views: Eyes Wide Open

June-July 2005

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.
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by Adam Bolonsky

Yvonne waits for me to join her to paddle to the Jade Bowl.

The first time I swam the waters off Thachers Island was probably thirty years ago, when my high school organized a rowing trip around Cape Ann, the rocky cape where I grew up and still spend much of my free time. The faculty packed us into wooden dories built by other kids enrolled in the school’s museum program. We put in at the ramp behind the school. The staff handed us a thicket of oars, told us to put our backs into it, and off we went. The trip took three days—a 26-mile circumnavigation many paddlers regularly run now in under four hours.

Rowing tediously past the island’s distinctive pink granite shores, after having shoved off from another island in whose battered, keeper’s cottage we’d taken refuge from a torrential downpour, I decided I’d had enough. A classmate was absentmindedly manning the sculling oar at the stern. I told him it was high time he gave up that cushy job. His turn to row, my turn to steer.

The day was hot and humid. Our instructors’ boat was astern, in a swirl of waves and confusion as they circled around a laggard dory and shouted at the dory’s crew. With a glance at my dorymates, three miserable teenagers who, like me, had each withdrawn into silence, I shipped my oar and leapt overboard.

Cape Ann’s waters are always a crapshoot, shallow swaths of warm fenced off by bars of cold. Even during August a patch of water can differ by tens of degrees from another just a few yards off. And when I hit the water I knew I had thrown a loser. The cold shock was abrupt: a whack to the forehead, blunt as a watermelon.

Once I was back in the boat my skin began to tingle. The writer John Updike (no seakayaker as far as I know) writes how physical comfort can soothe even the most anxious, outraged child. I was that outraged child, discovering I could soothe myself with a cold dip if the going got rough. Some of my trips to Gloucester and Cape Ann’s waters since have been an attempt to cure whatever hurts, even if what hurts now is usually more significant than adolescent orneriness.

Thachers Island has also since become for me and other paddlers a place of refuge. For me, it’s all about the water. Although the island’s not that far offshore (a 4-mile trip by the long route, 2 by the short), its waters provide far more than distance from shore. Access is provided to the top of one of the island’s soaring twin granite lighthouses up a narrow stair which twists around like a corkscrew. You pause on landings with curved walls punctuated by peepholes through which you can peer at slats of land, swaths of ocean. Finally you reach the top and a narrow door that lies just beneath the crawl-in to the light’s beacon. You step through Adam Bolonsky the door into a swirling wind. You look out, you look down, and there it is: the portion of the world which hangs here from the curve of the earth.

Years after my adolescent dip in Cape Ann’s waters, I am back at the top of the Thachers Island Lighthouse. Yvonne Rosmarin is up there with me, and when she looks down from the catwalk she nudges me and points at the water with her elbow (for nobody ever lets go of the railing). She says:

“I see a swimming hole.”

I look down. Far below rests a natural pool formed by a semicircular series of rocks, a shelf, and several boulders which bulge out from the island. There are narrow gaps in these natural walls through which the sea sloughs in from the steady groundswell. Numerous natural step-shelves at one corner of the pool might hold our kayaks above the surge should we drag the boats up high enough. We descend the tower, paddle out around the island, and dive right into the pool from one of those shelves. I’ve brought swim goggles; the first creature I see is a striped bass hovering over a hole in the bottom of the pool, pulsing its dorsal fins like an actor flexing the muscles in his jaw to show how meaty is the problem his character has to mull. I look closer; the striper begins to stalk a crab settling into a hole.

This time Adam stays in the boat and his friends in the North Shore Paddlers Network go for a swim around him.

Thereafter, Yvonne and I go to the Jade Bowl as often as possible, packing wetsuits, fins and goggles into our kayaks. Just this month I paddled out there alone, landed on its wall, then dove into it with goggles and a wetsuit. Through my lenses I watched a blurred shimmer slide over a patch of sea lettuce that had grown on the bottom. The shifting and layered underwater prism was a rippling occult: a freshwater flow that had bored its way into the pool from a vein ashore.

Our kayaks have become little more than transportation these days. By this point, the number of days we have spent at the Jade Bowl, our kayaks scratched-up afterthoughts hauled up on the rocks, are probably double the number of hours it took me to row around Cape Ann with my classmates thirty years ago. Sometimes it’s not the number of miles you paddle, but rather where your boat takes you. With goggles and a wetsuit, and the willingness to get out of the kayak, you just might discover that fewer miles can take you further.

Likely there are dozens of spots like this in your local waters, especially if (let’s be honest), grinding out fifteen miles every time you paddle starts seeming dull. The keys are a willingness to scratch paint and gelcoat off your boat; the ability to land on rocky places others might avoid; and the willingness to put your fancy paddle down. Just like diving into cold water off a dory full of ticked-off kids thirty years ago taught me how to wash the mold off my outlook, maybe a willingness to get out of your boat will refresh you.

P.S. For you locals, Thachers’ northern tower is good not just to gaze from but also to measure with. Position your kayak on a course which places it just behind the southern tower and you will be able to look along a sightline that points due north and south. Back up on the catwalk, if you center off from the tower door by about fifteen degrees, then look down, you will see the shattered Londoner daybeacon’s iron pole offshore. Look straight down and there you’ll see the Jade Bowl, noticeable for the distinctive color of the weed that grows on the bottom. Yvonne, who is a swimming hole aficionado and often regarded as unobservant enough to get lost in her own closet, deserves full credit for the Jade Bowl. Time your trip there with the drop in the tide cycle though, because at high tide the Jade Bowl is no Jade Bowl at all but simply a rocky patch of water.

© Adam Bolonsky, WaveLength’s Eastern Correspondent, is a native New England sea kayaking instructor and sea kayak fishing guide based in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He will be helping with our upcoming Eastern Special Issue (deadline June 20, 2005). Adam@WaveLengthMagazine.com