De Pan

Oyster River Morphology

We put in on the salt water just 200 yards down from the house.  It's been almost two years since we moved in and S has not started a trip with me from our "own" shoreline.  We head north up the shore on a rising tide, the peak still three hours away.  But, even now we can skim over the boulder groins just being mindful not to take a chip out of the paddles on the rough and barnacle covered rocks. 



S finds the sea water fascinating...the gentle swell underlying the waves that raises and lowers the canoe.  It's a bit hypnotic.


The flood carries us into the Oyster River.  It has been several months since I've been here.  I always wondered why it carried the name.  I started coming here not long after Hurricane Sandy, and rarely saw any sign of oysters.  The river had a rather flat and sandy bottom.  Today, things are different.  I guess it took awhile, but once the tidal currents started moving sediment, it really started to move it. Much of what I had gotten used to must have been sediments carried in by the hurricane...one can't get into the Oyster at low tide because of a 1/3 mile wide sand bar at the entrance, and the hurricane easily topped the road that separates the marsh from the sea.  There is a dense oyster bed where there had been sand (they must have been buried), and an obvious deep channel is cutting itself in along much of the river's short length (only a mile is paddleable).