Today should have been an easy first day. It was only supposed to be 9 miles, with not too much wind. I usually can paddle 3 miles in an hour, and after testing out my fully (or so I thought) loaded boat during my guide training course I was confident that I would have no trouble at all. As I'm sure anyone who knows me can guess, it did not go according to plan. At all. I wasn't even able to leave my aunt's house without the doorknob falling out of the door.
I got up early today, but didn't plan to launch until early afternoon; I didn't want to finish up those 9 miles in the morning and have nothing to do for the rest of the day. That was mistake number one. I ended up arriving at the boat launch to see 1-2 foot whitecaps everywhere. What was supposed to be a westerly 10 knot wind was in fact a 15-20 knot northwest wind. With that in mind, there was exactly a 0.0% of me taking the original course I had planned.
Mistake number two I discovered half way through packing: I had forgotten my bags of freeze dried meals. Thankfully, I had to shuttle the truck back to my aunt's house anyways, so I was able to just pick it up, but forgetting something that essential is more than a bit disconcerting.
I finally got everything packed a good hour later than I had planned, said goodbye to Nancy (who is probably the only reason I was able to launch today), and hopped in my kayak. I made it maybe 10 feet before I discovered mistake number 3: when I had tested my boat on the guide trip, I only packed 12 liters of water in my boat, because the other 10 liters was supposed to be in the other boat. I had neglected to account for the fact that another 10 liter bag of water would be weighing me down. Now an overweight boat does a few things differently, primarily that it's steering goes to shit and it becomes incredibly hard to get moving from a standstill. That i was prepared for. What I really was not prepared for was how it would deal with waves. Rather than the bow riding over the waves as it usually does, it punched straight through them. I don't mean the deck got a little damp, I mean the entire front deck, up to the cockpit coaming, sticking through the middle of a 2 foot wave. Note to self: don't try going directly into waves.
Despite the rough start, today actually ended up being a good paddle. The course I took kept me mostly in the lee of islands except for crossings which, thanks to the wind and waves, I was mostly able to happily surf through pretty quickly. I ran into a pair of paddlers about half way through the trip, at the southern beach of Long Island, and got to stop to chat for a bit. Immediately after leaving that beach, I rounded a corner and came face to face with a raft of about 30 eider ducks and ducklings, who apparently also wanted to hide in the lee of the island. I gave them a pretty wide berth, and continued up the coast of the island past another dozen rafts of eiders. I dodged the huge ferry passing by and continued up to Bangs Island, where I spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out just where the hell the campsite was. I set up camo, cooked dinner, and re-stitched my wetsuit. Unsurprisingly, it has continued to literally fall apart at the seams, and I suspect I will be an expert seamstress by the end of this trip. Now I'm off to bed, so I can hopefully be up early enough tomorrow to avoid the wind and get a chunk of that 25 miles done in calm seas.
12 miles down, 205(ish) to go.
No comments:
Post a Comment