Margo Pellegrino is on a 500-mile journey from New Jersey to Washington, DC in support of Oceans 21, a Healthy Oceans Act to save our seas.  On Thursday, she paddled the Delaware and Raritan Canal in New Jersey, managing a couple of tricky portages along the way.

Margo's Blog: July 3 

Today's paddle found me riding the tide up to New Brunswick and the Landing Lane Bridge on the Raritan River. This is the best point to access the Raritan Canal, which was completed in 1830, I believe. It originally ran from New Brunswick to Bordentown. Going up the Raritan River, I had some company--Jim from the Raritan River Boat Club, where my boat was a "transient," paddled along with me in his little kayak. This was the second time he paddled it, and he did pretty well!

Then we parted on the canal, after Carl met up with us on the bridge.

Then I did a really stupid thing--as stupid as not managing our ocean resources properly-I decided I didn't want to risk my rudder on the rocks around the portages nor did I feel like being constantly trapped in weeds, so Carl took my rudder off and I had him keep it. Of course this was a stupid mistake. If you take a part off your boat, you should keep that part with your boat! So it was 12 painful miles without a rudder, extremely slow progress that set me behind, and much cursing and swearing, until Carl returned with my rudder, poor guy. Oh well, live and learn--a mistake to never be repeated!

After struggling rudderless for so long, I looked forward to moving faster with the rudder back on. I paddled along nicely for a bit. Then came the weeds.  Tons and tons of weeds. It reminded me of paddling last year with Lance Mamiya in the bays of the South Shore of Long Island. So it was paddle, paddle, back-up, paddle, paddle, back-up.  

The portages weren't too bad, but there was one that was loaded with poison ivy. At the next portage, I noticed I had ground up poison ivy leaves on my seat.... so I guess I can expect to look like a gigantic pustule in the up coming weeks. 

Besides the poison ivy and the portages, there was yet another "p" word for the day--plastic, lots and lots of it, mostly in the form of plastic bottles, but quite a few bags, too. Plastic bottles bobbed their way down the Raritan River and later on the canal I found them stuck in the lush growth of poison ivy that lined much of the banks. It really is amazing to find so much of it. Wherever there are people, there are plastic bottles and bags. And this translates into how many barrels of oil littering our waterways? (there is a photo of the "plastic pile-up" in Trenton.)

A special thanks to Bill Wolfe of PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) for coming out and actually waiting for three hours with my husband and a poor reporter and photographer for me to (finally) arrive.