No doubt about it - daylight savings time is really over. I tried to sneak in an after work paddle and ended up paddling across Triadelphia Reservoir in almost pitch darkness. The picture to the left is actually just after I started and that was about as light as it got. It was actually a very cool time to paddle - the water was smooth as a baby's behind and there were scads of geese on the water. On the way back, it really was dark and the geese were freaking out - I was surrounded by honking and would get within yards of them before they would start flapping their wings, throw up phosphorescent spray and take off. On the way back I had to navigate by the lights on the dam and I was afraid the Water Police might lock the gate at the ramp and trap my truck inside. However, I guess they do it at official sunset or so, not darkness.
I used my new Epic Wing paddle and I took 3 minutes off my usual 6.3 mile round trip time - I guess that is about a 5% improvement, pretty good. The Epic paddle unexpectedly came with white blades, which almost seemed to glow in the dark as I paddled back. I wonder what that looked like from the shore - I bet there are reports of ghosts or UFOs flying over the reservoir.
It looks like the folks at Google Earth have updated their imagery - you can see in the map below how low the water is at Triadelphia - that big white blob to the northwest of the start/finish was just a shallow spot in the spring, then it was two islands and now it is one gigantic island. All that white space along the shore wasn't there in the spring, either. You can see how the water in the coves (especially on the north side) doesn't reach the woods at all - none of the other access areas are open because of the low levels. The water level was actually up maybe 6 inches or so since my last paddle, which actually made it a bit trickier as I knew there were some obstacles (like rocks and submerged tree trunks) that were visible last week that weren't visible now. However, I managed to navigate by memory and not get dumped into the rapidly cooling water.
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