I'd been planning the NE Champs for months and every time I'd go out on the river it would be a little lower and the words of Julia Blatt, Executive Director of the Organization for the Assabet River (OAR) kept ringing in my head- "hope the duckweed isn't too bad". You see, the Assabet has a reputation for getting a little low and, ahem, skanky as the summer winds along.

Back in May I looked the automated gage report from Maynard after scouting for control locations and saw the level was 2.7 feet. I figured that if it fell to 1.5 I'd still be ok and I crossed my fingers. As the summer went by, fortunately a cool, wet one, the level went down and down and with a week to go had dropped to 1.4. Then it rained and went back to 1.55, then with only three days to go dropped back to 1.45, then 1.4 again on Friday. Close enough I thought and went to bed.

I woke up early Saturday to the sound of an enormous downpour. Radar showed a nearly stationary line of storms right over the Assabet from Westborough to Concord. And it went on raining for another couple of hours. Good, I thought, that'll bring it up a little.

But, when I went out to hang the controls Saturday afternoon I saw that the rain had raised the river almost two feet! That changed everything. The duckweed in the bays simply rose up and floated away. The crossable swamps were now uncrossable, or at least so I thought.

As the water rose, the vegetation and the hummocks floated right up with it. That meant the shoreline looked the same but was now considerably softer. My 6-foot stakes for hanging controls were now too short and I had to jam them in root clusters instead of the bottom. Still, I got all the controls hung and got ready for a very different meet than the one I'd planned.

Sunday turned out to be a beautiful day and 41 people showed up to enjoy the Collings Foundation's grassy shoreline. Paddlers for the Elite and Advance courses were shuttled to Gleasondale for a remote start while the Sprint and Standard courses started and finished at Collings. The two shorter courses show about half the action and the contestants followed fairly conventional tactics with the only difficulties occurring at the put-in/take-in where they discovered it was much deeper than it looked and several took an unplanned swim.

On the two longer courses some crazy herd mentally took over however. The second control was on a slough separated from the main river by a marshy peninsula and I fully expected people to paddle around. Instead, whomever was first down the river elected to portage or run over and back, it isn't clear, but when they did they left a significant elephant track and every subsequent boat took the same route. It didn't seem to matter that the control in the slough was in chest deep water; they just waded in and punched. Of course, they were now already wet and yuck-covered and so at the next control which was also not on the main river, they did it again. Rather than paddle around, they floundered through the swamp, probably taking more time than if they'd paddled. It was only about 15 meters across, but the vegetation was so dense that a couple people got misdirected and bushwhacked way around out of their way. Going back for control pickup was fascinating because here and there along the bank I'd see beaten vegetation where someone had punched their way through to the river.

It was a successful meet with 25 boats, roughly 50/50 canoes and kayaks. The most popular courses were the longest and the shortest, the Elite and the Sprint. Competitors came from as far away as Maine, Michigan, and Florida.

We had two rookie teams take honors. Daniel Engel and his father Steve of Framingham took their cruiser to win the Sprint in a blistering 20 minute. Martin Kessel and his nephew Ben Kessel of Natick ran away with the Advanced course using a stock recreation canoe, with Ben doing the swamp plunging rather joyfully. Peter Frykman and Kate O'Brien also of Natick were victorious on the Standard course in their folding kayak while Tom Page and Kyle Lanzit of Maine in a wood strip racer were the winners on Elite. Another notable performance was by first-timer brothers Steve and Seth Miller who'd studied in advance and set up their cruiser with clipboards and ran a 2K portage on their way to an impressive third in Elite.

We owe a big thank you to the Collings Foundation for the use of their shoreline. There is nowhere else along the river with enough parking. Bob Collings was out early Sunday morning pounding in stakes to mark the parking area and mowing a path to the river so we wouldn't get wet feet. Let's hope they let us do it again there sometime.

Many thanks too to the meet helpers, Ed Kotowski and his daughter Sara, Laura Lane, Terry Myers, Katie Coney, and J-J Cote'. Everyone already knows Terry and Katie are the greatest. J-J was the remote starter and drove the shuttle van and trailer, making trip after trip. Laura, Ed, and Sara get especial thanks for their unsolicited volunteering, especially Laura who emailed me with still a month to go.

Now, what about all those people who got soaked in the swamps on the Advanced and Elite, did they really need to do that? Maybe not. I timed myself for control pickup and did it at a leisurely pace in 128 minutes. And, I took no portages and never got my feet wet.

See you next year.