Connecticut River

The Connecticut River is the longest river in New England. It flows roughly south for 406 miles through four states and empties into Long Island Sound between Old Saybrook and Old Lyme, Connecticut. Its watershed covers 11,260 square miles and includes 148 tributaries. The river supplies about 70 percent of Long Island Sound's fresh water. Tides reach as far north as the Enfield Rapids in Windsor Locks, about 58 miles above the mouth. Hartford, the only state capital on the river, sits on an old floodplain that runs south to Middletown. At Middletown the river narrows and turns southeast, passing through thinly populated, hilly, wooded country before it widens into coastal marshland at the Sound. Large sandbars that shift at the mouth make the Connecticut the only major river in the Northeast without a port at its mouth.

The Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) runs public boat launches along the Connecticut section of the river. They include trailered launches at Baldwin Bridge near Old Saybrook and Bissell Bridge near Windsor, plus Haddam Meadows, Kings Island near Enfield, and the Hadlyme Ferry carry-in site near Lyme.

In 1614 the Dutch explorer Adriaen Block became the first European to chart the river, sailing as far north as the Enfield Rapids. The Enfield Falls Canal opened in 1829 to get boats around the shallows there. The estuary and tidal wetlands were listed as a Ramsar wetland of international importance in 1994. The river was named an American Heritage River in 1997 and became the first National Blueway in the United States in 2012.