This is the 3rd summer I’ve been in Boston, and thus my 3rd time seeing the Boston Pops/Fireworks July 4th spectacular! The fireworks are shot off a barge sitting in the middle of the Charles River between the Longfellow and Mass Ave bridge. The first time I stood on the Mass Ave bridge, which is closed off to traffic for the holiday, craned my neck up, and watched the display. The second time, I went to a party and stood on a rooftop in Boston, again craning my neck up to look at the explosions in the sky. This time was going to be different.
My friend Nisha has taken up kayaking recently and suggested that we kayak on the Charles River and watch the fireworks from there! I’ve been kayaking a few times, and agreed that sounded like a fun plan.
We grabbed our sea kayaks from Charles River Canoe and Kayaks and headed 3.5 miles down the river to where the action was located. We paddled around the masses of boats floating near the barges but decided that was not a good area for us to be-it was crowded, would require us to crane our neck to see the fireworks, and overwhelmingly smelled of awful gasoline. It was a hard battle back upriver with the blinding sun, wind, and waves, but we kept paddling around in search of the ideal viewing location. It was a bit difficult to do so as we kept on getting pushed down the river toward the boats we wanted to avoid, but by the time the fireworks show started at 10:30 (6 hours after we had launched) we had a perfect viewing location, no neck craning involved. It was like super high definition tv while floating on a river in the dark- an interesting sensation.
Kayaking Nisha with the Boston skyline in the background.
21 minutes later we turned around and paddled back upriver. We had 1.5 hours to make it back to the rental location. By this point, we were both getting tired, were being knocked around by the ‘interesting’ wakes of boats also heading back home. One time I turned around and there was a huge boat in back of Nisha’s relatively tiny kayak blowing its horn at her. It was a bit scary to be on the river in the dark with the possibility of getting run over by large boats. All we had signaling our presence was 4 glow sticks, 2 very bright ones, and 2 very weak ones. About an hour and 15 minutes later we made it back to the the dock, and hobbled our way back to the car. I was a long and tiring journey, but I’m glad I did it!
