Tuesday, August 24, 2010

sea kayaking

Just got back from a 5-day trip with Wilderness Inquiry to the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior. With a little help from the other participants I was able to fully enjoy and complete all activities. The first day was the tip test - proving you can pop your spray skirt and exit the sea kayak while upside down.  The only problem with that is once I was in the water my dry suit was so full of air that I floated like the Michelin man. I couldn't get my feet down to the lake bottom to walk in and had to be ignominously dragged to shore.
 Getting the dry suit on one-handed was an interesting exercise in patience, sometimes not too successfully when I would have multiple layers of ankle gaskets folded over cutting off circulation to my feet.

The actual paddling was quite successful, I could paddle for 5-10 minutes at a time, the form leaves a bit to be desired. But compared to last year(1 min. max) it was great, Still the best option would be to get a sit-on-top, would not have to worry about attaching the sprayskirt.

Dry bags, good thing I brought my own. They were thinner Sea-to Summit ones rather than the thick vinyl ones. With multiple smaller bags finding items became much easier.

1 comment:

  1. Hey Dean, it's nice to see that you have a blog. I put a link for it on my blog, as well as links for some of the other blogs that you suggest.

    best,-pete

    ReplyDelete