High water

Today we launched from Shelburne Beach. This week's thaw melted a thousand plus square miles of couple foot deep snow which then started running in what ever way it can towards the lake. The lake level rose about a foot in a day, and is now several feet higher than when I took a Greenland rolling class here in September. So what we really did was launch into the water now covering Shelburne Beach.

On some of the shore line the first line of trees were in the water, but it wasn't like last Memorial day when we were paddling through the middle of some woods.


This is a few miles north of last week's trip, but I could see that there was nothing left of those funky icicles. A few teeny ones are starting to form, but we haven't had the kind of waves it takes to wet a cliff 20 feet up since it went back below freezing.

This especially caught my eye as a blogger I read in New York posted about some illegal boat dumping down there a couple of days ago.
There were 3, I think, wrecked boats and a lost floating dock in close proximity hanging on or sunk next to shore (Spiderman sailboat???) The floating dock wasn't sunk, it was floating in like-new condition, but stuck in a cleft in a cliff.



I doubt they were dumped here, just washed up. This isn't the kind of neighborhood where the locals leave wrecked boats on their shore any more than they would leave a wrecked Bentley in the yard with a tree growing through it. When they come back in the summer, they'll have their people take care of it.

A nearby 24 bedroom "summer cottage," Well, formerly "cottage." Now a hotel, The Inn at Shelburne Farms



Around the next point past Shelburne Farms we headed out into the lake to catch a downwind ride back to the start.