During our recent vacation in Bethany Beach, DE, we spent the better part of a day kayaking on the Assawoman Canal. The canal is a protected natural area, with a greenbelt of trees and shrubs along its banks. Dredged to a depth of 35 feet during the past year, boats that clear the bottom of the low bridges travel the canal. We were fortunate to only have to deal with the heavy pontoon boat traffic on the return leg of our paddle trip.
When we launched our kayaks around 10:00 a.m. from the Guy Street boat launch area, the tide had turned and was running out. That meant that as we paddled to the northwest, we had a moderate current against us. On the return, we drifted along towards our destination when we felt like it. One nice feature of the canal is that most of it has old overhanging trees along the banks; shading boaters from the hot summer sun. A gentle breeze flowed along the length of the canal. When we explored a pond on the northeast side of the canal [before the Route 26 bridge], it was in full sun and alive with jellyfish. It wasn’t a very big pond and it was surrounded by a residential area.
We paddled to an area just north of the Route 26 bridge and then turned around for an easy paddle back to Guy Street. Didn’t see much widlife, but we heard birds calling and saw minnows in the shallows along the banks. Since I had to control my kayak carefully when the pontoon boats passed, you won’t see any pictures of the boats in the slide show I’ve included in the link above. It got interesting to watch the downstream bound boats passing the upstream bound boats. We timed it so that we weren’t next to two boats abreast. Wake wasn’t a real issue, but space was. The biggest wakes we encountered were from three Skidoos that had just launched from Guy Street. They were courteous, but their craft created higher wakes than the pontoon boats did. All in all a nice paddle trip and certainly a place I’d like to return to in cooler weather – and maybe paddle the entire 7-mile distance of the canal from South Bethany Beach to the Indian River Bay.
