Paddle to the Sea

The first step for our Schuylkill kayaking trip: getting kayaks.

by Brian Howard

This week's cover story is all about serendipity. For about a year now, ever since I biked over the Platt Bridge in Southwest Philadelphia and spied the tugboat and barges that churn beneath, I've been mildly obsessed with kayaking the length of the Schuylkill. (Not that I owned a kayak, mind you.)

Then a couple months ago, contributing photographer Michael M. Koehler dropped a line proposing a photo essay of the exact same thing. I think we both had grand plans of doing as much of the river within city limits as possible: Start out at Flat Rock in Manayunk, go over the waterfall at the Art Museum, and then go all the way out to the Delaware.

Of course, I've since been told by many people that boating the falls could kill you, and it turns out every weekend in April there are regattas that close a big chunk of the river to traffic.

So the murky brown waters of the lower Schuylkill would have to be our canvas.

Now, there was the tiny problem of not having boats. Renting kayaks just isn't something that's done much around here, at least not in the Schuylkill. I sent out frantic e-mails and Tweets asking if anyone knew where I could get my hands on a kayak. To no avail. As of March 30, exactly one week before we'd planned to disembark, we had a major boat crisis. Among the four people doing the trip (me, my friend Dominic, Michael and his friend Elan), we had just two boats: Dominic's new river kayak and an offer to use associate editor Molly Eichel's dad's ocean kayak — which, Mr. Eichel kept telling us, probably wasn't an ideal vessel for this kind of trip.

In a panic, I hit Craigslist and found a nice guy named Don in Wilmington who'd decided he needed money for grad school books more than he needed his thrice-used kayak. Koehler was able to borrow a two-man canoe, and Mr. Eichel's kayak was off the hook.

With a whole lot of help and advice from Joe Syrnick — CEO of the Schuylkill River Development Corp., the company charged with increasing access to the river and which runs kayak and riverboat tours between the Walnut Street Bridge and Bartram's Garden — we made it into the water. (Visit schuylkillbanks.org for more on the SRDC.)

Syrnick is bullish when he insists that much of the lower Schuylkill will soon be open to the public. The SRDC is about to bid out a project to turn the DuPont Crescent in Grays Ferry into a river park. And a feasibility study is not far off that will determine if an old, unused railroad bridge can be revived for walking and biking.

"That bridge would be a nice adaptive reuse of a really cool structure," says Syrnick.

And though the east side of the river south of Bartram's is squarely in the hands of Sunoco, "the west side is not being used for anything.

"It's a question of getting it," says Syrnick. "Obviously we're trying to march down from the north to the south, but you don't want to buy property that you're not going to develop right away. If you were going to build a trail [there] today, you'd be in a very isolated, lonely spot. That would be a little scary."

There's been a lot said about the sad, sudden death of Harry Kalas, and I don't have much to add beyond the fact that losing Kalas like this, so suddenly and so soon after the Phils' 2008 World Series win, is hard to take. It's comforting to know he got to see the Phils get off the schneid, and nice to think of him and his dear friend Richie Ashburn calling games again — because in heaven the Fightins always win. So long, Harry. Baseball won't sound the same without you.

(bhoward@citypaper.net)