BAREFOOT BEACHCOMBING

Saturday, August 26, 2017 -  Bennett's Creek - Suffolk, VA

The weather finally cooperated today. Moderate temperatures (mid 80s), lower humidity, no rain or storms. Great kayaking weather.

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I have wanted to paddle on Bennett's Creek for a while but just haven't made it over here. There is a full boat ramp in Bennett's Creek Park off Shoulder's Hill Road in Suffolk. It is a medium sized park (50-ish acres) and has a playground, picnic shelters, skate park, fishing pier, and frisbee golf course in addition to the boat ramps.

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The ramps are concrete and fairly steep and pretty popular with the power boating crowd. But i was able to launch on one of the side ramps with no problems. There are about a half dozen parking spaces for vehicles without trailers. I can imagine that that might be an issue on a busy day. But it was fine for me.

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This creek is tidal and the water level was pretty low when I launched. You can see a big difference in the water level on the marsh grasses at the beginning compared to at the end. Since the water level was low, it was shallow on the edges of the creek and my paddle was coming up with thick black mud.

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I went out from the ramp and headed across the creek and headed south down the creek. When you enter the park, there are signs saying that harvesting fiddler crabs was prohibited. I thought that was a strange prohibition, but once I got on the water, it made sense. Since the water level was so low, the mud banks were visible and there were hundreds of fiddler crabs scrambling amongst the grasses.

 

This area is somewhat sparsely developed. The east side of the creek is mostly farm fields with only a few house sprinkled among them. The west side of the creek has a few small neighborhoods. Most of the houses I saw were fairly large and most had really big boat docks despite the creek being fairly small. Bennett's Creek connects  to the Nansemond River about 2 mile above the park (in the opposite direction from the way I went today) and the Nansemond connects to the James River about 2 miles past that. So I'm guessing that's where these big boats go.

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I saw a lot of birds. Herons, egrets, ospreys, gulls, hawks. And lots of fish jumping including the BIG fish (I think it might have been a carp.) that jumped fully out of the water in front of me and scared the CRAP out of me. I'm not sure what prompted it to jump like that.

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The sky was full of big puffy clouds which helped make it feel very comfortable out there. There was a breeze (mostly out of the north) most of the time. But only on a few parts did I have to paddle directly into the wind.

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I took the Theta SC 360 camera with me and was able to get a good shot of the creek and surroundings.

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I paddled all the way down to the Suffolk Seaboard Coastline Trail. The trail follows the former Seaboard Coastal Railroad right of way and is surrounded by trees, farmland, and neighborhoods. It crosses over Bennett's Creek and winds through marshes. I saw several people jogging on the trail as I approached and paddled under it. Pretty cool.

 

Great paddle. 3 hours and 9 minutes on the water and exactly 6 miles on the GPS. Scroll below the pictures to see the track maps.

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Edit: Here's the GoPro video.