After heavy rains the two previous days, the dithering for this Thursday paddle was intense. I had hoped that the Patapsco would be up, but late Wednesday evening it was dropping quickly. I shifted my attention to Marsh Creek, but late that night it was dropping as well. I then looked at an old favorite, Passage Creek, which looked promising. So I sent an email to paddlers who’d expressed interest announcing that we’d be headed to Passage.
Overnight we got another heavy downpour. Passage was too high and heading higher. Marsh Creek at 8:00am Thursday looked good again at 1,280 cfs, in AW’s medium runnable range. So the email went out announcing another change in venue, this time to Marsh Creek.
We had 9 paddlers for this trip: Larry (OC1), Chad, (SUP) and Gary, Sergey, Virginia, Bruce, Peter, Randy and myself in K1s. We put in at the Cunningham Rd. bridge around noon and it looked like the creek was on the rise; it was now at 1,870 cfs, still medium runnable.
About 1 mile downstream we came to a low-head dam, which looked runnable but for the fact that the runout was clogged with wood, so we all portaged river left. Continuing downstream we paddled through the initial small rapid and soon after we were just above the first of two larger rapids on Marsh. This was around 1:30 and the level had now risen above 2,400 cfs and we were in high runnable territory. The rapid was blocked almost stream-wide by wood, but a small entrance passage through low hanging branches was available river left. A glance downstream showed that once clearing the passage we would be quickly in the teeth of the rapid.
And pretty impressive teeth it had, in the form of large irregular breaking waves, numerous holes and pour-overs, and turbulence as far as we could see. Chaos ensued. I went first and made it to an eddy on river right, nearly getting endered part way down. Larry followed me into the eddy and the rest of the group ran left of center.
However one of our group flipped, rolled up for a moment, and after numerous more attempts to stay up, they swam. I attempted a bow rescue but was a moment late and the swimmer sans boat headed downstream eventually to be re-united with the rest of the group.
Larry and I caught a river right eddy and spotted the kayak stuck on a mini-island (bunch of rocks with some vegetation). Larry ferried about 20 feet across to an almost-eddy at the lower end of the mini-island, scrambled onto the rocks and tied up his boat, then poked and prodded the stuck kayak with his paddle across a gushing rivulet of water. The boat came loose after about 5 minutes of this poking and prodding, but Larry wasn't able to get a rope on it, so off it went downstream and miraculously found its way to its owner, who ended up in an eddy on river right.
At that point the level was over 3,000 cfs and still rising. We re-grouped before the next big rapid and two paddlers decided they were done for the day. Fortunately, we encountered a good Samaritan and sympathetic boater herself who lived next to the creek and she volunteered to drive the two paddlers and their boats back to the put-in.
The remainder of us scouted the next rapid and carefully worked our way down, ferrying above a large log blocking most of the entrance to the main flow. From there it was read-and-run through another turbulent section, although less intimidating than the first rapid. Shortly after we came to the river-wide natural dam, which all of us portaged, and then to the take-out.
By the time we were done the gauge was reading around 3,330 cfs, well into the high runnable range. Gary Steinberg pointed out to me that with the gauge 6 miles downstream, we were probably catching a bubble of 3,000+ cfs the entire run. At this level, I think it is approaching a III+ or IV- classification. Exciting for sure, but with the accumulation of wood above the big rapids, nothing to be trifled with.
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Water Level Note - Since Marsh Creek's 73 sq mi basin at the put-in is 42% of the 173 sq mi catchment at the downstream Bridgeport gage, the volume experienced by Mark's crew would have been about 1,260 cfs. Alf Cooley