Spring! May 2004
This issue is about spring. For the first time in all the years I’ve spent on this river, I decided to chronicle — in an admittedly faltering fashion — the progress of this season. Rather than a series of articles about different events and topics, this issue will track the changes I noticed in the river as winter released its grip and spring arrived in our little section of the globe. My trip reports will resume in August, when I will describe the trip from Strongwater Brook in Tewksbury to the takeout just below I-93 in Andover.
We greeted the season of spring in a non-traditional fashion. On the morning of the last day of February, we paddled through three miles of Andover.
Then on the vernal equinox — March 20th this year — we paddled the eight miles between Rte. 3A in Billerica to Rte. 38 in Tewksbury. Six inches of snow still covered the floodplains and banks, and thin sheets of ice jutted out from the shore, breaking up with a crinkling sound as the canoe’s wake touched it. The only things green in sight were the White Pines.
On March 27th, I paddled the upper three quarters of the First Meadow in Bedford and Billerica. There was still no sign of anything green in the floodplains, though I did note the presence of two new beaver colonies in the Bedford section of the First Meadow.
On April 1st and 2nd, a prolonged rainstorm caused the Shawsheen River and several of its tributaries to flood. That, effectively, marked the real onset of spring. On April 10th, we conducted our first of the monthly paddling trips of the season. This one is always Rte. 4 in Bedford to Rte. 3A in Billerica, from the First Woods through most of the First Meadow.
I noticed that the river’s edge shrubs and the trees in the woods were budding. In the First Meadow, I noticed the first shoots of green marsh grass meekly poking up through the sere brown and gray of last year’s growth. The giant Black Willow at the Billerica/Bedford border looked as if it had finally given up the ghost. One of the beaver lodges had been abandoned — probably flooded out the previous weekend. It looked as if it had collapsed on itself. The colony had moved a third of a mile upstream and constructed a new lodge in a stand of Buttonbush.
Noticeable by their absence on April 10th were the congregating hordes of waterfowl. In fact, we saw only male/female pairs, each a discreet distance from any other pair. It dawned on me toward the end of the trip that what we had seen three weeks earlier had been the equivalent of an avian prom party. In the speed-dating process dictated by the New England growing season, these birds had already picked their partners and were shacking up twenty days post-prom. The Canada Geese were still obstreperously loud, with one staying in place while the other tried to lure us away.
Then on May 1st we paddled the same eight-mile trip we took on March 20th. What a difference forty days makes! The marsh grass was ten inches high and seemed to be growing before our eyes. The Buttonbush still looked moribund, but the leaves at the base of the cattail stalks had begun to emerge and were already taller than the marsh grass. There were budding leaves on just about every other deciduous or perennial plant. The Canada Geese were almost all hunkered down on their nests.
Perhaps the most significant sight of spring on that trip, however, was that of at least six different Great Blue Herons in the Third Woods and Meadow. We may well have a rookery on the river this year.
This exquisite time of year — when the air is clean and warm without mosquitoes — will last only a brief while longer. The mosquitoes will be back in the next three weeks, and they will hold sway for another three to four weeks until the bats and dragonflies return. So now is the time to get out on the river as often as you can to witness nature’s amazing rebirth in New England. By the second week in June, it will have settled into its summer stasis.

February 29th
On Sadie Hawkins Day, we got our second day of the belated January Thaw. The temperature was already pushing 40 degrees by the time we started putting our boats in the water just downstream from the Ballardvale dam in Andover. With seven canoes and one kayak, we were sixteen people and a dog paddling downstream through one of the prettiest 3-mile stretches of the Shawsheen River.
The only challenging parts of this trip were the put-in and the take-out. The normal path down from the parking lot to the put-in was an ice cascade. After Mary Kay Rauseo took one step on the path and then slid out of control to the bottom, everybody else followed a rope line down to the water. At the take-out, the canoe would pull up to the shelf of ice. Then somebody on shore would hold the boat in place with a potato hook. After the person in the bow got out, the people on shore would pull the boat — with the stern man still in place — up onto the ice. This was the only ice we had to deal with on the entire trip.
In addition to the ubiquitous Mallard Ducks and Canada Geese, we saw a Belted Kingfisher right at the put-it. It stopped cackling as it swooped down to the water level and flew by the first two boats in the water before heading back up into the trees and resuming its call. Wood Ducks were abundant throughout the trip. Most intriguing of all, however, was the beaver lodge on the Pomp’s Pond side of the river, just downstream from Pomp’s Pond. This is the first established colony on this river’s main stem that has not felt the requirement to build a dam. (I know of five beaver lodges in a three-mile stretch of the Concord River with no dam nearby.)
There was remarkably little visible trash in the river, excepting the cloth-upholstered sofa in the water just below the put-in. It felt good not to see the normal amount of bottles and junk-food wrappers we normally associate with early season canoe trips. It was, as Joe and Linda Moore both commented, a wonderful thing to do on a warm, sunny, Sunday at the end of February.

March 7th
The water was still high from the snowmelt of a warm week. Mallards, Canada Geese, and Wood Ducks were all in both sections of the First Meadow, despite the constant sound of heavy gunfire from the Woburn Sportsmen’s Club.
I went on the trip to check the new Rte. 3 bridge. The sky was cloudless, and it was warm enough in the sun for me to wear only my PFD for insulation. The water was high but still completely within the channel. There is beaver activity in the First Meadow just upstream from the Rte. 3A bridge, but still no sign of a lodge.
There are two new beaver lodges in the First Meadow between Middlesex Turnpike and Rte. 3. These are evidently new lodges and are within half a mile of one another. The larger of the two had been constructed among a stand of Buttonbush. The other one is a mostly mud construction right on the edge of the channel, where the water meets the sedge grass.
There are the beginnings of a new dam in the spot where I have been expecting beavers to build for the last two years. It is still low, and I was able to paddle right over it going upstream. There is still a lot of debris from the construction of the bridge throughout the upper third of the First Meadow. It is apparent by the absence of beer, wine, and liquor bottles that the beverage containers all come from the worksite. There is still a lot of good lumber in the river near the bridge.
The point of the trip had been to examine the affect on the river channel by the bridge’s drainage pattern. I had been told that the drainage system had caused a sandbar to form on one side of the river. I did not see that, but I did notice that an enormous sand-and-gravel bulge in the middle of the river obliterates the channel directly under the bridge.
The most uplifting sight of the day — this soars far above the beautifully clear sky and warm weather, the wonderfully high water, and the mostly absent trash — was that of two Redwing Blackbirds. These harbingers of winter’s end were not singing yet, but they were obviously looking for something. I thought they were seeking the ideal nesting site. I saw them many times up and down the First Meadow flying from one Buttonbush to another. They were there early. In another two weeks, they will be joined by hundreds of others, and the meadows and woods may already cackle with their calls and challenges.

March 13th
This is another trip upstream through the First Meadow. Both beaver lodges are still in place with signs of normal activity. The water is still high, and the number of Redwing Blackbirds in the meadow can still be counted on two hands. The black plastic corrugated hose from the Rte. 3 bridge site has moved further downstream.

March 20th
The Vernal Equinox Paddle was a startlingly beautiful eight-mile trip from Rte. 3A in Billerica to the Knights of Columbus in Tewksbury. The aesthetically stunning quality of the trip overwhelmed the dull brown of the wetland grasses strewn across the snow-covered meadows and the dreary gray bark of the leafless trees. The White Pines with their brilliantly green, feathery boughs stood out beautifully, and the water was clear and high.
The weather, the colors, and the abundant wildlife contrasted with the snow and ice in such a way that we had the impression that we were paddling through a transition zone. You could feel spring promising to come in; you could almost see winter receding as the last vestige of ice at the river’s edge cracked noisily in the wake of our canoes.
The thing that really stood out, though, was the exaggerated presence of waterfowl. The Canada Geese were as numerous and obstreperous as they usually are, but the ducks were present in hitherto unseen numbers. It seemed that at every turn in the river, regardless of whether in the woods or a meadow, several dozen ducks would explode into the air, quacking and chirping madly as their wings percussed the air. There were, of course, countless Mallards. Among them, according to Joe Moore, were a fair number of Black Ducks, who have been miscegenating with Mallards, the affect of which has been the dilution of Black Duck gene pool and the expansion of the Mallard’s.
The Wood Ducks have become a common sight on the Shawsheen River. At least, they were a common sight on March 20th. They almost never took off with the Mallards and Black Ducks, preferring to hide under low hanging branches until the canoe had come so close they could wait no longer. After a couple of dozen such encounters, the frantic squeaking of an alarmed Wood Duck began to seem comical.
Also seen were the occasional pairs of Buffleheads and Mergansers. It seems a little early to spot Mergansers pairing up, but there is always a pioneer. By mid-April we will see them throughout the woods and meadows of the river. They have been returning in growing numbers every year. Birds common to the river that we haven’t seen a lot of over the winter were a Belted Kingfisher and more than one Redwing Blackbird. (I saw two pioneers on March 7th in the First Meadow.) The few we saw on this trip were still puffed up against the cold and weren’t calling out for mates yet. I imagine that by the time this newsletter is published, the raspy calls of Redwing Blackbirds in full-throttle lust will seem as common as a Chickadee’s two-note song.
The only challenges were the standard ones: the three beaver dams and the old Middlesex Canal viaduct. We went around the first beaver dam and over the other two. There was about a two-foot drop after both of the major dams. You could stand on the dam itself and pull your canoe over. The water was high enough that getting by the old canal viaduct resembled one of those log rides you see at amusement parks. You settled your boat into the chute next to the viaduct and rode the stream as if it were a conveyer.
These paddling trips marking the changing of the seasons have been well attended in the last few years. If you only do four trips a year on the Shawsheen River, these morning trips on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes and on the summer and winter solstices really provide you with a sense of the seasons on the river.
Although the river and its trees and meadows look equally dormant at winter’s beginning and end, the wildlife evident at winter’s end promises the pending spring. Join us on June 21st and see the river in its full-blown growing-season glory.

March 27th
One week after the vernal equinox paddle, I put in at Rte. 3A in Billerica and headed upstream again. It had been three weeks since I had last done this trip, and I wanted to check on the two beaver lodges I found last time as well as on the progress of the only thing resembling a beaver dam in the entire floodplain. I found the first beaver lodge in the center of a Buttonbush stand a quarter of a mile upstream from Middlesex Turnpike. It was twice as large as it had been three weeks earlier, and it was completely covered with sticks and pieces of lumber.
The second beaver lodge, just upstream from the nascent dam, had been abandoned. From the disheveled pile of sticks, I gathered that the lodge had collapsed. The canal they had dug into the bank of the river for an entrance or exit looked rather forlorn.
Just because I didn’t feel like turning around yet, I paddled on upstream. I saw less lumber than last time, so either somebody has come through for it, or the beavers have really figured out how to use it. At any rate, within sight of the new Rte. 3 bridge, I encountered a new beaver lodge.
This one hadn’t been there three weeks ago, and it didn’t even have any sticks or lumber on top of the huge hump of mud. It looked like it would stand for quite a while. My guess, just based on the dimensions of this second one as well of the first one is that these are not the first lodges these particular beavers have built.
The biggest surprise of this little eight-mile trip was the emergence of the Painted Turtles. I counted ten turtles that I saw, and I recognized the shuffling-grass-plop-splash sound sequence from twice that many. I hadn’t expected the turtles to emerge for another three weeks.
As it happened, there was a great deal of activity at the Woburn Sportsman’s Club as well at the Bedford Police firing range. I now think of Iraq rather than the West Bank when I paddle through with heavy gunfire on either side of the meadow.
The abundant waterfowl seen the previous week starting a mile downstream were noticeably absent in this part of the First Meadow. The Red-wing Blackbirds, however, had increased their presence in the intervening week. By the time the Buttonbush leafs out, they will be everywhere.
Real spring with its riotous participants and ferocious greening seems incredibly close, almost like it will be here tomorrow.

April 3rd
Flood: The floodplains are full of water, and it’s impossible to paddle under the bridges. I spend a good part of the morning driving to various river crossings and watching the ferocity of the flow.

April 10th
This was the first of our monthly paddling trips down stream. It was a beautiful day, and the water was high. There were trees across the river in Bedford as well as a lot of trash, a lot of which had been moved down into the top of the First Meadow by the flooding of April 2nd & 3rd.
A juvenile beaver sat on the bank in Bedford and watched the first two paddlers slowly pass; it seemed fascinated by us and probably hadn’t seen a human before; it slid into the water and watched Miranda from just beneath the surface as she paddled past. The second canoe spotted the albino Red Tail Hawk that inhabits the First Meadow. The first Great Blue Heron of the season took off from near the bottom of the First Meadow but turned upstream and showed itself to everybody else.
The White Suckers were in full breeding orgy, right on time. One pair of Wood Ducks was spotted. A lot of Canada Geese, even in the First Meadow between the two gun ranges, one of which was quite loud and active. There were so many Canada Geese that Mallards looked almost rare and exotic by comparison. The geese seemed to be preparing to nest. They all seemed to have paired off. The clusters of Canada Geese that we saw a mere three weeks ago are split up into pairs.
The grasses were just beginning to emerge; the shoots were between one and three inches tall with a fair distance between each blade. We could clearly see the Water Lily tubers on the bottom in the backwaters, but they had not started sprouting yet. One peculiar thing we noticed was that the First Meadow above Rte. 3 is choked with Purple Loosestrife, yet just below Rte. 3 and throughout the rest of the First Meadow; the native grasses have for the most part supplanted the Purple Loosestrife.
It’s evident that we will need to have a lot of boats and hands to clear up the trash next week for the cleanup through here.

April 17th Cleanup
There are, and probably always will be, the occasional catastrophic event that causes extensive damage to the river as a habitat and/or navigable waterway. Such events are early and late winter snowstorms, which typically produce heavy, wet snow that tears large branches from trees. These fall into the river and create “strainers” that stop anything solid from passing downstream.
Severe thunderstorms — with their high water, strong winds, and lightning — bring down whole trees as well as wash all manner of trash from the sidewalks and streets into the river. Even a long, gentle rain will clean the streets and dirty the river.
This is precisely what happened in the first week of April this year. We had two or three days of steady rain, and the Shawsheen River flooded, as did Content Brook. What the high water rushing under and against the new Route 3 bridge over the Shawsheen River did was pick up all of the construction debris that the folks at Modern Continental forgot when they left. It seems as if they finished the bridge, took a look around, and declared, “We’re outta heah.”
So, on the third Saturday of April, we held our first formal cleanup of the year. Because of the high water, it was another river sweep, and it followed the same route as our canoe trip the previous weekend.
In most river sweeps, we are able to pick stuff up and dump it into the canoe. At the end of the sweep, we haul out the 40-gallon contractor’s trash bags and empty the canoe. The trash bags go out on the curb with the household garbage on trash pickup day.
That was going to work only as far as the First Meadow this time. Because of all the debris in the First Meadow, we needed to empty our boats of the trash we’d already picked up. We had a logistical problem with no obvious solution until we remembered that the Bedford DPW used to be willing to haul away what we pulled out of the river as long as we said where we were going to leave the trash and when.
When we called, they remembered us and offered to send out a crew the following Monday to retrieve what we had collected. These cleanups would be so much easier if other DPWs were as cooperative as Bedford’s.
The participants in this cleanup were:
Jack Brady
Ken Doran
John Hicks-Courant
Sharon Lapham
Bob Marsh
Frank Perdicaro
Robert Rauseo
Lee Walus
Lee Yates
Except for me, everybody put in at Rte. 4 in Bedford. Per our agreement with the Bedford DPW, they would leave a pile of debris next to Shawsheen Street at the old well field. Then, with empty boats, they would continue through the First Woods and into the First Meadow.
I put in at Middlesex Turnpike and paddled upstream. I had two particular sites in mind, and I knew it would take me at least two trips and at least three hours to clean both spots. Twice I filled my 19-foot boat with finished lumber in 6– to 20–foot lengths and filled in the empty spaces with bottles, cans, and hundreds of stray pieces of foam packing material. About the time I got back to the landing with my second load, the others began arriving. Their boats were as full as mine. The final take on removed trash for the day was:
9 full 40-gallon trash bags
10 tires
350+ pounds of finished lumber.
We left what could not be salvaged — a lot of the lumber was in perfect shape — beside the pump station next to the First Meadow on Middlesex Turnpike.
This cleanup was, more than anything else, just one more step in the iterative process of eradicating the evidence of Modern Continental’s blatant disregard for the environment it builds in. Some of you may remember the slurry of emails and outrage about Modern Continental’s trashing of the river reproduced in these pages last year. The debris from the bridge expansion continues to depart the work site and put ashore in the floodplain. We honestly think we may finally have almost reached the end of it. The flood of the first weekend in April purged the work site, and our cleanup of the First Meadow two weeks later seems to have caught most of the debris.

April 24th
This was another foray upstream into the First Meadow. The marsh grasses have grown another two inches, and it looks like the leaves at the bases of the cattails are beginning to emerge. The Canada Geese are skulking quietly now. They seem to be staking out their territorial nesting claims.
I see two Canada Geese sitting with a bare tennis ball. It is white and about the size of a goose egg, which I take it for on first passing. On the way back downstream, they abandon it, and I see what it is. The stupid goose had been sitting on a tennis ball.
Painted Turtles are everywhere and still more furtive than later in the season. They are detectable only by their shuffle and plop, and I see only about a dozen, and them only because they are more sluggish than the others. What I’m really looking for is a Snapping Turtle, which I regard as the signal that summer has finally arrived. When I look in all the right places and don’t see one, everything seems on schedule.
The Redwing Blackbirds still aren’t abundant, and their individual calls still stand out. Their raspy cacophony is probably still a few weeks away. The turtles are still not evident in their abundant numbers, though I do see a few more than I did last time I came through here.

May 1st
This May Day event was billed as the Merrimack River Watershed Association (MRWA) annual paddle down the Shawsheen River, but the SRWA folks outnumbered the MRWA by something like 10:1. It was a beautiful, clear day, and the water was high and clear.
I’m so familiar with this river that I was caught off guard when Silvia — the Paraguayan exchange student living with us who accompanied me on this trip on March 20th — asked if this was really the same river we had paddled before. The meadow has been completely transformed from the barren field of snow-covered dead grass. It had become a vast field of green grass that seemed to be adding inches as we looked at it.
Even if the normal river inhabitants of spring weren’t there in their usual numbers, spring had definitely arrived. There was an urgency in the bird songs that had been missing until now. The Redwing Blackbirds outnumbered the Grackles and Blue Jays in the woods. The Cardinals and the Gold Finches added splashes of flying color that I had forgotten I missed. The water was high enough that we paddled right over the beaver dams, inflicting minimal damage.
The wind was a noticeable obstacle to flawless navigation in the floodplains, but for the most part, this trip was about as easy as paddling gets on the Shawsheen River. As the first boat downstream, I encountered one tree that had fallen across the river, requiring Silvia and me to get out of the canoe and drag it over the trunk.
Twenty minutes later, I heard Cap’n Chainsaw go to work behind me. I don’t think anybody else encountered that obstacle. When I asked him about it an hour and a half later, he looked unusually pleased with himself. He seems to like the SRWA’s new chainsaw very much.
Between the Sachem Street and Little England beaver dams, the impoundment has left a number of tall deciduous trees dead. It was here that we saw six different Great Blue Herons. It is so unusual to see so many herons in such a small space that I suspect what we saw was the initial stages of a heron rookery.
If that is what develops, it will be the first one on the Shawsheen River in living memory. It will also speak volumes about our success in restoring the aquatic habitat to the point where it can sustain enough fish to support a heron rookery.
There was one other notable occasion on this trip. Larry and Sharon Lapham paddled it. They haven’t paddled this stretch of the river since that cleanup a couple of years ago when they tipped over more than once and had to reload the trash they had been carrying. They took the record for number of tires loaded in one day, even if they were only carrying seven.
Even though we extracted five tires from the river on this trip and saw two others we couldn’t pull, this eight-mile section of the river looks as if two cleanups, one in each half, should suffice for the season. Please join us on the Billerica cleanups in May and June.

The White Sucker
By far the most common and largest fish in the upper two thirds of the Shawsheen River, the White Sucker is often mistaken for other species is it is briefly glimpsed from a canoe or kayak. There is often a white line on the leading edge of its pectoral fins that make it appear as a Brook Trout to many people.
Characteristics: 10–24 inches; back dusky-olive, sides greenish yellow; head flattened above, snout blunt; mouth large, on underside
Habitat: Cool, clear lakes and streams over sand, gravel, and rocks
Breeding: Mid-April, in groups under shading cover; males develop two bright red gripping stripes on each side; two males trap a female between them and stimulate her to emit eggs and themselves to reciprocate. You will see them in huge numbers roiling the water beneath the bridges throughout the river from Bedford to the Ballardvale dam in Andover.
Range: Northern half of western hemisphere east and north of the Rocky Mountains
The White Sucker is quite tolerant of a great variety of conditions. It apparently prefers large streams and the deeper water of impoundments. It is found in fast waters and sluggish streams and in association with dense weed beds.
White Suckers feed on a variety of foods, including aquatic insect larvae, crustaceans, mollusks, and algae, particularly those forms found in the bottom ooze.
Footnotes:
Illustration by Sharon Lapham
Text borrowed from McClane’s Field Guide to Freshwater Fishes of North America (Henry Holt & Co., New York, 1974) Page 101

SRWA Annual Members Meeting
The annual Shawsheen River Watershed Association Members’ Meeting will be held on Wednesday, June 9, 2004, at the Tewksbury Public Library, 7 PM - 8:45 PM. The meeting is open to the general public. There will be large maps, aerial photographs, and other materials on display. Refreshments will be served.
The main order of business is the election of the board of directors by SRWA members. Terms run for two years. SRWA strives to have a diverse board. We currently have board members from Bedford, Billerica, Tewksbury, Andover, North Andover, Lawrence, Amesbury, and Kingston, NH. If you are interested in serving on the SRWA board of directors, please contact Bob Rauseo.

SRWA Membership
The SRWA Executive Committee recently decided to change our membership schedule. Beginning June 1, 2004, all memberships will run for one year, starting on June 1 and ending on May 31 of the next year. A few notes:
Existing memberships. No existing membership will be shortened. In fact, all existing memberships will be extended. Memberships scheduled to run out before May 31, 2004 will be extended to that date. Memberships scheduled to run out after May 31, 2004 will be extended to May 31, 2005 at no extra cost.
New memberships. New memberships (and renewals of lapsed memberships) received between now and December 31, 2004 will run through May 31, 2005. New memberships (and renewals of lapsed memberships) received after January 1, 2005 will run through May 31, 2006.
SRWA keeps its membership dues low. We are an all-volunteer organization. We keep our expenses low and have received several grants and numerous donations.
We believe we accomplish a great amount for very little cost. We hope you agree and join us. A membership application form is located on the back of the cover sheet.

Volunteer Opportunity
At a recent SRWA meeting, Riverways staff presented a slide show outlining the following project. We would like to set up a Stream Team for the main stem of the Shawsheen and some of the major tributaries. If you are interested, please contact Bob Rauseo at BobOtter@aol.com or at 978-851-9505.

Evaluating Fish & Wildlife Passage at Culverts and Bridges
Stream Teams will learn to identify and pursue solutions to stream crossings that act as barriers to fish and wildlife passage. The network of roads in our communities fragments the continuity of our rivers and streams. Poorly designed culverts and bridges disrupt habitat by preventing fish and wildlife passage. Volunteers will learn to identify these problems and work with the Riverways Programs to prioritize and plan for solutions.
As part of the River Continuity pilot project, Stream Team volunteers will identify road crossings along streams and rivers that block or inhibit fish and wildlife passage. After a short training with Adopt-A-Stream staff, volunteers will work in groups to assess culverts and bridges for sufficient water depth, substrate, and appropriate flow velocity.
Working with the River Restore staff, Adopt-A-Stream staff will help volunteers develop Action Plans, prioritize problem crossings and plan potential remediation. Through a partnership with UMass Extension, River Continuity aims to reduce adverse impacts of road crossings on fish and wildlife movement.

Miscellany
Every Tuesday evening at 6:00 during Daylight Saving Time, join Cap’n Chainsaw and Robert the Dauntless Tire Hunter on their weekly quest to slay just one more dragon. Typically a large tree that has ignominiously given in to gravity, the dragons they confront are multifarious and unwieldy. Call Robert at (978) 851-9505 if you would like to join them.

Saturday, July 17, 2004
River Cleanup in Tewksbury. We will focus on the section between the George Brown St. bridge and the old railroad trestle below Mill St. in Tewksbury. Meet at the K of C on Main St. in Tewksbury at 9AM.

Saturday, July 31, 2004
Canoe Trip. From Lowell Junction Road in Andover to the Ballardvale dam in Andover. This is about two miles, the shortest and easiest of the trips we will make as a group this season.

Every single weekend of the summer!
We’re out on the river, and we encourage you to join us. We have canoes, PFDs, and paddles to lend. Call (978) 851-9505 and as for “Bob” — yes, that’s the code word — if you would like to take advantage of this offer.