Sailing down river

April 10.

Down river to half a mile below Carlisle Bridge, the river being high, yet not high for the spring. Take boat at Stedman Buttrick's, a gunner's boat, smelling of muskrats and provided with slats for bushing the boat.

The water on our left, i. e. the northwest, is now dark; on our right, has a silvery brightness on the summits of the waves, scarcely yellowish. Waves here do not break. 

From Ball's Hill the Great Meadow looks more light; perhaps it is the medium between the dark and light above mentioned. 

Seen from this hill in this direction, there are, here and there, dark shadows spreading rapidly over the surface, where the wind strikes the water. The water toward the sun, seen from this height, shows not the broad silvery light but a myriad fine sparkles. 

The sky is full of light this morning, with different shades of blue, lighter below, darker above, separated perhaps by a thin strip of white vapor; thicker in the east.

Look now toward Carlisle Bridge. See ahead the waves running higher in the middle of the meadow, and here they get the full sweep of the wind and they break into whitecaps; but we, yet in the lee of the land, feel only the long smooth swells, as the day after a storm.

It is pleasant, now that we are in the wind, to feel the chopping sound when the boat seems to fall upon the successive waves which it meets at right angles or in the eye of the wind.

This meadow is about two miles long at one view from Carlisle Bridge southward, appearing to wash the base of Pine hill, and it is about as much longer northward and from a third to a half a mile wide. We sail this whole distance with two or three pitch pine boughs for a sail, though we make leeway the whole width of the meadow.

We lay to in the lee of an island a little north of the bridge, where the surface is quite smooth, and the woods shelter us completely, while we hear the roar of the wind behind them, with an agreeable sense of protection, and see the white caps of the waves on either side. 

When there is a ripple merely in our calm port, we see the sunny reflections of the waves on the bottom. It is warm here in the sun, and the dog is drying his wet coat after so many voyages, and is drowsily nodding.

H.D. Thoreau, Journal, April 10, 1852

See ahead the waves running higher in the middle of the meadow, and here they get the full sweep of the wind and they break into whitecaps. See April 10, 1856 ("I set out to sail, the wind northwest, but it is so strong, and I so feeble, that I gave it up. The waves dashed over into the boat and with their sprinkling wet me half through in a few moments.");April 14, 1856 ("I steer down straight through the Great Meadows, with the wind almost directly aft, feeling it more and more the farther I advance into them. They make a noble lake now. The boat, tossed up by the rolling billows, keeps falling again on the waves with a chucking sound which is inspiriting"); March 16, 1860 ("I make more boisterous and stormy voyages now than at any season. . . . I vastly increase my sphere and experience by a boat.")  See also A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, Sailing

When there is a ripple merely in our calm port, we see the sunny reflections of the waves on the bottom. See March 26, 1860 ("The yellow sands of a lonely brook seen through the rippling water, with the shadows of the ripples like films passing over it. ");  March 10, 1853  ("At Nut Meadow Brook . . . gazing into the eddying stream. The ripple-marks on the sandy bottom [and].the shadows of the invisible dimples reflecting prismatic colors on the bottom. ")