The Water Calls Me

So this past weekend my beautiful wife and i finally found / made the time to go kayaking. We have two necky touring kayaks. Some people might even call them sea kayaks. Not us, we hardly ever have them out on the sea so we call them touring kayaks. The touring kayak is designed for one thing, distance. One can travel farther, faster, and use less energy than a standard recreational kayak. A Rec kayak is about 6-10 feet long. Our touring kayaks are both about 17 feet long.

Well, I think this last weekend we might have pushed it a little bit. We kayaked for about 10 miles saturday. Not a big paddle. We've done it a dozen times and will do it a hundred more times before our kayaking days are over. Sunday however we decided to do a stretch of the Etowah River between My parents house and our apartment. Well, because the river snakes back and forth a dozen or so times on the map it is hard to measure distance. As the crow flies the trip should have only been about 10 miles. We did the trip and went home exhausted. When we got home and looked at the map we realized that it had to have been a bit longer than 1oish miles. I took a piece of thread and traced it along the Etowah River on the map and then straightened the thread out over the distance key in the corner. To my surprise, it seems we paddled some 22 miles. So over the entire weekend we probably paddled 32 miles. Well, Jess wasn't feeling well the next day do to an ear problem and i was just beat so we took monday off recuperated instead.

We learned our lesson though. Before any outdoor adventure make sure that you have done all of the appropriate research. especially if it is a trail or river or excursion that you have never done before. We will not make that mistake again any time soon.

Well, I haven't mentioned it yet be we didn't plan on pulling the kayaks out Behind our apartments. We planned on going all the way to Lake Allatoona. We only went half way. So we pulled our boats out in the middle of the woods. There was no boat ramp nearby. We ended up dragging both of out boats up, one at a time, about a 10 feet bank. I stood on the bank with a rope in my hand and my vest and spray skirt still on my body to be used as armor for the thick brush we were hiking through. My wife stayed by the waters edge. Every three seconds I would pull as hard as i could while Jess pushed the boats up the ledge. We then drug our boats one at a time through about a hundred yards of brush and trees. We couldn't pick the boats up and walk them out, it wa just too thickly wooded. Then we carried the boats another hundred yards through some trails that we knew were back there. We hid our Kayaks in some high grass and got my truck to get them out.

We hurt. . . Bad. . . We will do the other half soon.