The Boquet River is notoriously wet during flood times. The river and the nearby Lake Champlain area also have a reputation for being wet in another sense.
In 1776, Essex citizens poured rum from a captured British Bateaux into what is now called Grog Harbor, rather than allow the British to recapture the vessel and enjoy a drink.
Alice Higby Downs writes of a "queer bit of history" during the War of 1812 when her ancestor Levi Higby owned forges and a distillery "doing [his] utmost to supply grog enough for American soldiers and seamen, it being a time when warm ardent spirits were in great demand." Alice lived in Willsboro 93 years and wrote a history of the town and its people around 1920 called The Story of an Old House.
According to Alice, a British naval commander who was chagrined by mistakenly targeting a Lake Champlain island for an American warship decided to find a more sensitive target for his cannon balls. He dropped anchor at the mouth of the Boquet, lowered his galleys, moved up the river to Willsboro falls, than marched into town. Levi Higby met the British Commander and showed him through his forges. "From the forges the visitors were conducted through the distillery and officers and seamen were pressed to taste every brand of spirits" while the American militia were secretly summoned. The groggy British seamen made for their galleys amid the whizzing of musket balls. At the mouth of the river, the Americans "picked off nearly every red coat who showed his head on the gunboats below."
Morris Glenn (historian, author, and summer resident of Essex) notes the probability of floating taverns in his manuscript on the history of the Boquet River between Willsboro and the mouth at Lake Champlain.
With the men who were working on the lighters (small craft used to transport goods along the river to upstream towns or to large boats on Lake Champlain) and manning the ferry (an old ferry, called the Boquet ferry, used to operate in the 1800's near the mouth of the river to aid travelers in crossing the river), plus the presence of a number of travelers and other working men from the fields and Willsboro Point Quarry, it should not be surprising that a floating tavern or two stopped by on the river. I have no idea where any of these floating taverns operated or how substantial they were. However, a July 13, 11884 newspaper article provided documentation with a note about "a Canada boat manned with two French Canadians with a full supply of spirituous liquors near the mouth of the river." The Canadian boat was selling whisky to workers at the quarry on the point and creating a nuisance in the neighborhood. It was probably an old canal boat, lashed to the bank by ropes and reached by a narrow gangway.
In the 1890's there was "good entertainment to visitors" on Split Rock. Vermont was dry, and many a thirsty man rowed back and forth across the lake at night for something to quench dusty mouths and numb sore muscles.
And, a February article in Adirondack Life Magazine (quoting from the April 6, 1922, Ticonderoga Sentinel), related an incident about a booze runner who was held up while driving near Elizabethtown. Four thieves took off with the booze and $160.