This morning around 8:30, my neighbor Jeff Lindeman and I put into a minimally watered Canal just above Carderock's Lot 4, paddled up to the Logwall towpath bridge at Widewater and back, taking but two hours. Cool (70 degrees) and sunny, the day couldn't have been better. We looked at the newly refurbished Highwalls dry-laid masonry aqueduct along the cliff face before entering our kayaks and oozing up the canal for a couple hundred feet until the bottom attains a respectable depth. This paddle is most varied, leading through the woods and into a couple of broad lake-like sections and through a dark and narrow passage between them hewn through the bedrock. At several places downed trees almost completely obstruct the Canal, but we managed to push through without leaving our boats.
The overgrown wooden steps down into the Canal at Anglers have been used, but other boaters, probably unaware, had beaten a muddy path down the other side of the Anglers bridge. Good opportunity for a visit with a weedwhacker. Widewater is always a delight, open and brilliant. For lack of time we paddled only to the Logwall, ducking under the towpath bridge to inspect the waste weir where much of Widewater's inflow splashes down six feet into the little brook leading off to the Potomac. On the way back, we encountered a great blue heron, a deer, five turtles, innumerable Canada geese and goslings, and a paddleboarder. Not as lively, perhaps as a morning in the Chutes, but very restful and satisfying.