New to Kayaking

After half a year on layaway, Beth and I finally completed the transaction and took delivery on our new kayaks this past weekend. We learned or were reminded of several good lessons:
  • What is known in New Hampshire as a fairly small pond is the equivalent of what would, in Maryland, be known as a pretty substantial lake. Our first outing with our new boats was to a beautiful body of water known as Grafton Pond. It has apparently grown from its original size as a result of damming, but it's still considered to be pretty small. In Maryland, there are no natural lakes. (A fact I learned years ago from Beth, who knows many things.) This means that our Maryland-oriented sense of inland bodies of water is pretty warped. In a sense, these lowered expectations are good for us. They keep us from taking for granted the comparative grandeur of our new environs.
  • When the wind kicks up, a flat body of water can become surprisingly choppy, surprisingly quickly.
  • There are places (for example, one particular area I found myself in while trying to complete a circuit around a little island) where paddling against the current is a fairly futile exercise. Sometimes, it makes sense to just let the current do with you as it will for a while. When the view is nice and there's no rush to get anywhere quickly, this can be a most enjoyable approach.
  • It is wise to carry a GPS device with you when kayaking. Covering pretty good stretches is really quite easy in a kayak, and without a GPS device handy, it would be easy to lose track of where you put in. As Grafton Pond is not very big (by local standards), and as we were eager to get out on the water, we had neglected to pack a GPS device with us. So, once out on the water, we made an early decision to not go into the various coves and out-of-the way areas of the pond. Instead, we made sure to keep the access beach in pretty plain sight. This, of course, detracted from what the expedition could have been, but we had a wonderful time anyway.
  • Mini Cooper + roof rack +kayaks results in an assembly that's too tall to fit though our garage's doorway. So, while we can attach and detach the rack to and from the car inside of the garage, we have to load and unload the kayaks to and from it outside. The overall appearance of the whole assembly is fairly comical. (I'll try to remember to take and post a photo on our next trip.) We got ourselves some pretty short kayaks. Had we gotten the Pungo 120 model instead of the Pungo 100, the boats would actually have been longer than the car.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Bell Ringer Joke Revisited

or: If I'm Destined to Get a Pulitzer Prize for 02008, This is the Line of Thought That Will Earn It For Me I'm pretty sure that it's been at least two decades since the idea of The Bell Ringer Joke started knocking around in my head. (I've mentioned the joke in a previous blog post .) There has been hope and despair, laughter and great disappointment, spread out over more than half my lifetime! On Thursday morning, out of the blue, I had a few epiphanies regarding the joke for all of these years. Epiphany #1: The first and second parts of the joke are spectacular, and if I had not been told at the time that I first heard them that there was a mysterious third part floating about in the ether, those two known parts would have been deeply satisfying. There would have been no disappointment associated with The Bell Ringer Joke whatsoever. The two parts stand together as a complete and brilliant story, riotously funny. Which is to say that the third part is only relevant...
Read more

Avalanche

Image
This blog has been untouched for a great many months. In case anyone out there is subscribed, I'm posting this here. I've spent the last several months working in my too-rare spare moments on a video project that I consider to be the most important thing I've ever worked on in my life. But it only matters if people actually see it. It's scheduled to debut on YouTube at noon Eastern time this coming Wednesday (August 26). Please consider taking six minutes of your valuable time to watch it and then please, please, please consider sharing it as far and wide as you possibly can. Thank you. -L.
Read more

In Memoriam, Mark Cassorla

We just got back home last night from another vacation, this one to Texas. This vacation was interrupted by a side trip I had to make to bury my cousin Mark, who decided that he needed to kill himself on Monday morning. It's hard to express all of the feelings this has drudged up. But I feel as if it's somehow my responsibility to try to say something appropriately solemn. I always thought of Mark as "Marco". I'm not really sure whether this is because I grew up hearing other people calling him Marco or not. As I've mentioned before, I'm cursed with a horrible memory. So I honestly can't say whether anyone else ever called him Marco, although in my mind's ear, I can pretty clearly hear it rolling off his father's tongue. I'm also not sure whether I ever called him "Marco" to his face or whether the nickname resided strictly in my head. What I can say is that in some sense I always felt closer to Mark than I ever felt to any other ...
Read more