It started with an eel.

When it came writhing out of the black water that long-ago summer night, my second thought, after first wondering how I would get it off my line, was how it ended up here in a small Chester bog pond almost 40 miles from its origin in the Atlantic Ocean.

I knew from past reading the eel had made its way upstream as a one-inch elver nearly a decade earlier and would soon return to the saltwater as a full-grown adult. The contemplation of that epic journey inspired me to retrace its route.

And so some years later on a spring flood, my 12-year old son and I retraced the eel’s journey in a canoe and, in so doing, discovered the Exeter River.

The Exeter is one of the family of New Hampshire coastal rivers that flow eventually to the Atlantic. The Lamprey, Winnicutt, Oyster, and the river I grew up on the Bellamy are virtually indistinguishable from one another. A voyager plunked blindfolded in a kayak into one of these rivers would be hard-pressed to identify it as one or the other when the blindfold was removed.

The rivers are uniformly tea-colored from the leaf tannins, mixing slow bends with fast-drops over shale rapids, but at some point or another­usually over dams constructed by the first settlers to capture the power of falling water­they become salt water.

Over the 20 years or so following my first spring trip, various companions and I made the Exeter River trip several times, dubbing our adventure “Chester to the Sea” the "sea" liberally defined as the salt water below the dam at Exeter.

We typically leave at first light from a roadside in Chester and finish, sometimes in the dark, at Newfields, Adams Point or Newmarket, depending on how well we judged the outgoing tide. We may portage as many as 20 times over dams and blowdowns along the river’s length.

A friend and I once estimated we dipped our paddles 20,000 times during the 12- to 14-hour trip.

We start out bundled against the morning chill, shed clothes in the midday warmth, and rebundle as the shore lights twinkle. Along the way,we see the best and worst of this coastal river that rises in hillside seeps in Chester, gathers itself from many streams, then passes largely unnoticed through six towns on its way to becoming the Squamscott River that finishes in Great Bay.

The best parts of the river are the confusing swamps, where the river’s true course is often determined by the bend of the underwater grass, and the stretches of dark rapids where the tea-colored water disguises the rocks that scrape plastic curlicues from our boats.

The worst parts of the trip aren’t the natural hardships of the journey but seeing the insults to the river done by those who see it as convenient disposal for their leaf piles, old tires and worse. Less obvious, but more damaging, are the chemically-treated lawns at the river’s edge whose lushness spells slow death for the river.

It has been the misfortune of the Exeter River, like the other coastal rivers, to flow through some of the most heavily populated areas of New Hampshire, doubly unfortunate because the rivers have been largely unprotected by the state’s Shoreland Protection Program and so have suffered more insults than their larger inland counterparts.

Each year we’d set out optimistic, hoping that for every clear-cut shoreline with a lawn sweeping down from the house to the water’s edge, we’d find a secluded river bend, and for each discarded tire, we’d find a log covered with painted turtles.

This year, we have cause for new optimism. Changes to the Comprehensive Shoreland Protection Act due to take effect July 1 will protect the Exeter River from Sandown to the sea. The new rules will prohibit many insults to the river.

So each spring when the trout lilies bloom and the water is high enough to allow passage, we’ll once again dip our paddles and head downstream. I like to think that as we paddle, we float above elvers squirming upstream toward a distant bog pond.

By Greg Lowell, Wildlife Coverts Cooperator