Lake Jocassee – I – A Night At The Opera

If you get onto one of the paddling lists that Richard keeps in his head, you may get a phone call the night before a multi-day trip inviting you to get your gear wet…

This time, it wasn’t Baja or the Costa del Sol, but definitely a local paddling area that was on one of my lists: Devils Fork State Park, Lake Jocassee, South Carolina.

Lake Jocassee is in Sumter National Forest which forms the NW-most tip of SC where it borders TN and NC.  This area is about 10 miles from Table Rock State Park (check out the photo’ map view on the slideshow).

We camped at the neighboring Lake Keowee Toxaway State Park as the Jocassee sites were all taken, which worked out great for me as I got to scope out more of the area for future reference…

In keeping with the spirit of ‘Drop off the schedule to go paddling with The Grove’, I didn’t want to know much about what the plan was.  As long as water obeys gravity and bubbles eventually float, I’d make it back to my desk…  So, this was some sort of pre-arranged Paddle.net group meet/place-smile-to-pile things.  Folks were bringing their hand-tooled, wooden marvels for show and tell, plus of course the paddling cameraderie.  Paul Deiner brought 4 boats including his FloBot collapsible kayak I wrote about in the Gear section.  Belton Dykes rode up in the truck with us from ATL and he too had a wooden stitch & glue kayak he had made.

Not being a real paddler, I have only a passing curiosity in the great tree of paddling, nevermind the ethnocentric adaptations in the various forks of said tree.  I may have looked into what distinguished a British Form kayak from the GreenLand/Inuit, but I had no appreciation of the difference between stitch & glue vs. strip built kayaks, besides the raw construction process.

If you do a quick search of the web you’ll find a day’s worth of links to sites filled with videos and articles on all of these topics -which is my way of saying that I won’t contribute to channel clutter by reproducing any of it here.  Interesting stuff.  Paul is past-his-elbow deep into it.  It was very much like going to a sushi restaurant and having to learn how to use chopsticks, which masks the glorious subtleties of the main event.  The action of the GreenLand style paddle is novel and no doubt your brain will learn how to finesse it.  If it were a horse it’d be an Arabian, no spurs allowed.  Once you get it to agree to do what you think you both might enjoy, you’re in for a great time.  If you ever have the chance to use one, try and be rude and borrow it for as long as you can to wear down the learning curve.

There’s not much I can say about the superb wooden craft that some folks brought.  When I paddled in Paul’s creation, I felt like I was playing Three Blind Mice on a Balestrieri violin.  Very, very nice indeed and then back to my plastic boat that can take a punch and enjoys looking for a fight up every creek.  Well, that’s not really fair.  I guess I embraced the fact that my devotions lie elsewhere, but I am truly appreciative of the opportunity to try on a dress for the ball…  Does it come in a green-gold-fleck?

The next day…