Inflatable Kayak Blog

By Guest Blogger … Sheryl Connelly

Ahhhh.. March. A time to turn our thoughts to the greening of the countryside and a little wearing of the green for St. Patrick’s Day. But have you ever thought it a time of sea-kayaking in Ireland?

Sea kayaking is fast becoming the raging sport in the Emerald Isle for natives as well as those visiting from abroad, even in winter. Imagine coming face to face with puffins (the real ones that PakBoat Puffin Kayaks are named after) and seals, or harvesting muscles in the wandering sea-caves, islands and coves that dot the coastline. Experience the amazing scenery, nature, and wildlife that Ireland has to offer at an unhurried pace while you listen waves of the Atlantic gently lap against your kayak.
I know what you’re thinking. Sounds like a great trip, I’m so in! Ho there, adventurers. In addition to general paddling skills, you need complimentary skills such as navigation, tides, weather, route-planning, weather forecasting basics and technical stroke improvement before you venture out into the Irish Sea. The importance of appropriate judgment calls and seamanship skills are critical to not only trip enjoyment, but survival.

So how can you learn all of these advanced skills if you are a lake or river paddler? And how do I transport my kayak on Aer Lingus?

Good news! There are hundreds of sea-kayaking businesses in the coastal towns of Ireland catering to beginners that are more than happy to teach you the ropes. Best of all, most provide ALL the essential equipment you need so you can save room in your luggage for mementoes. However, in the spirit of being good boy/girl scouts make sure to come prepared with the “little” things:
·    A swims togs / shorts (for under your wetsuit!)
·    A towel
·    A pair of trainers / sandals that you don’t mind getting wet.
·    A sun hat / sun cream
·    A water bottle
·    Waterproof / disposable camera (optional)
·    A sense of enthusiasm / Adventure!

During the winter months you could also take along:
·    Thermal undergarments
·    An extra fleece top
·    Warm hat

Fishing anyone? Try your hand at netting your big catch in a sit-on-top kayak. Why fish from a kayak when you can hire a charter boat? Kayaks allow you to go where and when YOU want to. Too shallow for the bigger boats? Too steep or rocky a coast line to fish from or too muddy to wade?  Open yourself to a whole new experience by combining Sea Kayaking and Sea Angling.

Are you an intermediate kayaker looking for a romantic way to pop the question, celebrate your anniversary, or note a special occasion? How about a moonlight paddling expedition? Allow the quiet magic of Ireland embrace you and your loved one, while all the sounds of the sea are amplified. The heightened sense of awareness, beautiful night skies, and lighthouses guarding you as you paddle set a dreamy backdrop to your exceptional day.

Check out these fun links for more information or to plan YOUR next adventure:

http://www.seapaddling.com

http://www.h2oseakayaking.com

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9ICSqwOIoc

Sheryl Connelly is a frequent visitor to Ireland and an avid outdoors woman. Her next trip to Ireland is tentatively scheduled for late March. Learn more about Sheryl at www.sherylbrennan.com or http://www.managemmm.com.

I was looking for interesting places to paddle along the Georgia Coastline and found some information on Crooked River State Park, just outside of St. Marys, GA, one of the oldest cities in the United States. It’s essentially the gateway to Cumberland Island National Seashore, the largest of the Georgia Coast’s barrier islands. The seashore covers 17 miles of white sandy secluded beaches complete with wild horses, sea turtles, dolphins, shore birds, dune fields, maritime forest, and salt marshes. Sounds like a pretty nice place to experience nature.

Hiking is very popular at Crooked River State Park. There are three trails you can follow and it is best to stop by the visitors center to get a copy of the trail map to help you navigate the trails. Cherry Point trail is a 4-mile trail, Harriett’s Bluff is a 6 mile trail and Grover Island is an 8 mile trail. All are round trip distances. Dolphins travel in groups upriver to fish and are spotted 50% of the time on all three trails. Once the dolphins corner a school of bait fish, they will surface often to breathe while feeding. You can hear their blows to locate them. More than 100 gulls, cormorants, and egrets often perch on a raised boardwalk across the marsh. Bald eagles and osprey have also been spotted.

Elliott’s Bluff public launch is probably the best launch area for kayaks. If you take an chance and launch at a random location along the shore you may experience the oyster beds that will cut your feet and may do some damage to your kayak. An inflatable kayak might be more prone to damage than a hard shell kayak, although the Sea Eagle Explorer kayak material has been known to stand up to oyster beds quite well. It’s also best to launch your kayak when the tide is coming in, so it’s best to check the tides before planning your paddle.

Now that I’ve discovered Crooked Lake State Park, it’s right up there on my list of places I want to kayak. And the dolphins might move it to the top for our next trip!

My wife and I save all of our wine corks in a decorative vase which sets on a shelf above our wine rack. But there’s a couple of other uses for those old corks other than decor or tossing them out. Of course, the synthetic corks that we’re seeing more and more of won’t work for this fire-starting tip, but the traditional corks will.

Try soaking some old corks in a jar of rubbing alcohol. You can then use a few of them underneath logs and newspapers in your fireplace to get your fire going quickly. You should light them with a long-handled starter for safe use.

Another way to use them is to take them along for your camping or overnight kayaking trip. Soak some corks ahead of time, then wrap them in foil and seal them securely in a zip-lock plastic bag. If you want, you can store them in your dry bag, but be sure they’re well sealed in their own bag first so the odors don’t escape.

(Candace Clayton is an author who’s written novels, poetry and other short stories. She was kind enough to write this fictional adventure story specifically for the Inflatable Kayak Blog about ‘The Traveling Man’, a kayaker who tells us a tale about a youthful adventure with his buddies on the river where he grew up. We hope you enjoy it!)

(When left our hero, he was about to join his buddies to chase off some ‘dad burned females’ from their swimming hole. However, suddenly, in the middle of the river, where the water ran the deepest and coolest, emerged the most beautiful mermaid he had ever seen.)

Water dripped off her and caught the sunlight in millions of sparkly prisms. I was struck nearly blind by her radiance.

I  figured this glorious beauty was part of that annoying group invading our water hole. What to do! If my buddies succeeded in running off that gaggle of chicks, this vision of pure loveliness would leave too. I just couldn’t let that happen, so I did some quick thinking.

My plan was ingenious, or so I thought at the time. I reached out and ducked John under the surface, by way of the fact that he was closest to me and had the loudest voice. That feller come up out of the river spitting and sputtering with blood in his eyes!

I never even saw what was headed my way. I was still in awe of the angel so innocently floating in the river having no idea of the trouble her mere presence was causing. Next thing I knew, John jumped on me and was swinging as fast and as hard as he could. He got me with a quick upper cut and knocked me clean out.

John says, my inner tube, with no regard to my condition, kept floating down river. right past them women folk. And as soon as they saw me they set up a hue and holler fit to bring down the gates of heaven.

My buddies, seeing me floating down river, with no never mind of where I was headed, left off their plan to scare those girls outta’ the river and set up a chase after me. By this time I was getting closer to the next bend in the river.  Devil’s Peak, we locals all called it. I am sure you can prolly guess as to why we called it that.

Devil’s Peak was not big as waterfall’s go. We were in Texas after all… not a lot of hills and such in those parts of the country, but I can guarantee a waterfall can be powerful mean to a body when it has the mind to.

So there I was, floating unaware to what could very well be my last trip down any river. John was hollering at the top of his loud lungs, “Wake up, wake up! You gonna’ go and get yourself killed!”  As I was just comin’ to, naturally, I wasn’t in the mood to take another hit.

I looked up just in time to see the roiling white water. The instant I hit the rapids, my tube flipped and dumped me headfirst into the churning river.

Good thing was I was now wide-awake and aware of my pending doom. Bad thing was, my tube popped.

I could barely see John waving his arms and yelling something at me, but couldn’t understand what he was saying.  Whether this was due to the water rushing around me or the fact that I had been dealt one of the hardest punches I had ever taken in my life, I don’t rightly know.

I went under the water again, but this time when I popped back up, I cold see John at the riverbank ahead of me. He was holding a limb out over the water. I struggled to reach for the tree branch on my way past him. Just when I thought I wasn’t gonna be able to grab the branch, something pushed me up from underneath the water.

As soon as the branch touched my palm, I grabbed on to that bit of bark as tightly as I could while John and the rest of my buddies pulled me to the shore.

I never did see what gave me that shove out of the river and saved my life, but my gut told me it was that golden haired vision I’d snuck a glance at before all the ruckus started. In my opinion, I was saved by a real live mermaid!

I didn’t tell anyone at home the truth of what happened that day. I didn’t have too. John had seen the whole thing. We never spoke of it together, but the look in his eye when he pulled me to shore told me he knew.

That’s how my life of traveling the rivers and oceans came to be. I went back to that river time and time again, but she was gone. So, I packed my camping gear and hitched a ride to the bus depot.

That’s where I ran into John, carrying his backpack.  Seems we were of the same mind. The two of us climbed on that ole bus without looking back and headed out to find that dream.

What’s that? Did we ever see the mermaid again? In later years, paddling one of my fancy, new folding kayaks? Well, I ain’t saying we did, and I ain’t saying we didn’t. You’ll have to come visit again sometime for another story and find out.

The author, Candace Clayton, lives in Granbury, Texas with her Husband and family, spending as much time in the outdoors as she can.

(Candace Clayton is an author who’s written novels, poetry and other short stories. She was kind enough to write this fictional adventure story specifically for the Inflatable Kayak Blog about ‘The Traveling Man’, a kayaker who tells us a tale about a youthful adventure with his buddies on the river where he grew up. We hope you enjoy it!)

I’m a traveling man by nature.  I’ve been traveling for pert near my whole life. I‘ve seen some interesting places, met lots of people, and enjoyed experiences I never woulda had chance to enjoy back home. I’ve traveled by horseback across the plains of Texas. Traveled by train across half the good ol US of A. I’ve flown high above the oceans to exotic places like Japan and Egypt. Even traveled down the River Nile by steamboat. Man that was some trip!  Course by far and above, my favorite way to travel is by Kayak.

Ah, Kayaking! I can still feel the wind in my hair and the water splashing back in my face. Man against nature, or more likely, it‘s man working with nature to get past those patches of whitewater. Mother nature always put on a show; fish jumpin’ in the water, cliffs and riverbanks flowing past me as the birds sing and the frogs croak. Course, those skeeters were pesky creatures, but the places I saw were worth a bit of discomfort.

My love of the river started when I was just a youngun. My buddies and I grew up on the good ol Brazos River.  Land sakes, I can’t count the hot summer days we spent floating down the river on our patched up inner tubes, which are a far cry from the inflatable kayaks we know today. Of course, we couldn’t very well afford kayaks back then. Shoot, we didn’t even have an oar! We didn’t care though. To us, those inner tubes that carried us from one bend of the river to the next were better than them golden chariots the angels in heaven use to get around.

We sure had us some good times on those hot summer days.  Days where the heat rises from the ground in waves and there ain’t a breeze to stir the trees. On a day like that, the river is the best place to be. Shoot fire, it’s the only place you can get cooled down at all.

Like I was saying, here we boys were, riding down that river, desperate for a cool breath of air. We’d almost gotten to our favorite swimming hole, just around the next bend where the water ran deep and cool.

Just as we were gettin’ geared up to dive out of our tubes into the water, we heard a horrendous noise.

Sounded like hundreds of birds a twittering and splashing in a birdbath, but when we got closer we realized it was the high-pitched giggling and squealing of a group of folks we had no intentions of sharing our swimming hole with: girls.

Sure enough, our eyes confirmed what our ears hadn’t wanted to believe. There had to be at least ten or so of those annoying creatures splashing around. We couldn’t believe our bad luck. No matter how hard we screwed our eyes shut, those girls wouldn’t go away.

My buddies and I were getting ready to run those dad burned females right off the river; when it happened. All of a sudden, right in the middle of the river, where the water ran the deepest and coolest, emerged the most beautiful mermaid I’d ever seen.

(Is it a real mermaid? Visit the Inflatable Kayak Blog (on Tuesday, 2-23-10) for part 2 of our story. If you’d like, you can set your computer to receive our RSS feed and you’ll be informed automatically when the next part of the story will be posted.)

The author, Candace Clayton, lives in Granbury, Texas with her Husband and family, spending as much time in the outdoors as she can.

While watching the coverage of the Vancouver Winter Olympics, it’s hard not to be impressed with the breathtaking views that NBC uses to introduce and transition their coverage segments. The commercial that features Canadian natives such as Michael J. Fox, Steve Nash, Kim Cattrall and Ryan Reynolds inviting us to visit has some pretty nice scenery, too. This type of majestic beauty always draws me in and in the process of searching for places to kayak in British Columbia for my ‘kayaking vacation wish list’, I happened to run across a blog written by a guy who calls himself “paddlesheep” and uses an Innova Sunny kayak, a very versatile inflatable kayak that’s known to track and handle very well. He blogs about a kayaking trip in British Columbia that lasted seven days and took him through the southern gulf islands, starting in Swartz Bay and ending in Ladysmith. There’s some nice pictures, too. It’s simply titled “Inflatable Kayaking in B.C.”

Now, I have to get back to my “wish list!”

Most of the United States are currently experiencing some really bad winter weather. Not the best kayaking conditions, to say the least. That’s simply disappointing for most of us, but this type of dreary weather can have a seriously detrimental effect on others. About one in ten million Americans suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD). “SAD” is a prophetic acronym. The folks who suffer from it often experience feelings of depression, lack of energy, increased need to sleep, craving for sweets, weight gain and a weakened immune system. Symptoms may start out mild and become more severe as the fall and winter seasons progress. It’s not easily diagnosed, but if you notice these symptoms, you might want to talk to your doctor about it. Only in the most severe cases will doctors prescribe anti-depressant drugs. Phototherapy – the use of light boxes and dawn simulators may also be used. This involves sitting in front of a specialized light box that exposes you very bright light. It’s easy to use and has relatively few side effects.

The best treatments for SAD, though, are the natural solutions you can do on your own like making your home sunnier and brighter by opening up blinds and trimming tree branches that may block the light. Get outdoors on sunny days, even in winter. Outdoor light, even when the sky is overcast, provides as much or more light than phototherapy. Take long walks. Studies show that symptoms improved when individuals took a one-hour walk outside daily. Regular exercise helps relieve stress and anxiety, both of which can increase SAD symptoms. Get enough rest, eat a balanced diet and take time to relax. Most of these ‘treatments’ sound like a good way to stay fit and healthy, too, so it’s a win-win solution, even for those who don’t have SAD but may have a strong case of ‘cabin fever’. And … if all else fails, take a trip to a sunny location with your inflatable or folding kayak and enjoy the sunshine! That could be the best cure of all!

Fishermen and women in the Susquehanna River Regions in Maryland, Pennsylvania and New York have a new, free fishing magazine available to them. The first issue came out a couple days ago on February 2, 2010. It’s being distributed through local establishments and funded by participating advertisers. The magazine’s goal is to help to inform anglers about productive angling techniques and other pertinent information pertaining to the area, as well as promoting safety and responsible stewardship of the river. They hope to distribute abut 30,000 copies each month. For additional information and locations where you can pick up a copy, you can go to the Susquehanna Fishing Magazine web site.

I know it’s a little cold in the Susquehanna area this time of year, but it’s never to early to start thinking about warmer days relaxing on the fishing boat in search of a great ‘fish’ story!

In a recent internet search I found a web site that has some good information that kayakers in California may find useful. It’s called the ‘California Boat Launch Ramp and Put-in Index’. You can find it here. The site includes maps, which allow you to easily find a locations to launch your kayak, as well as other helpful information. The web site is interactive, too. You can add your comments on places you have been, read what others have discovered and add replies to posted comments.

I personally appreciate being able to easily find convenient launch locations. It’s especially helpful when traveling to unfamiliar areas. Even though my inflatable kayak allows me the luxury to launch almost anywhere, I still prefer a regular boat launch area for safer parking and general amenities.

I wish I could take a pictures like this but I’m not sure I’ve got the guts to kayak with whales. That’s right, whales! Fifty six year old Duncan Murrell of Paignton, Devon in the United Kingdom is an extraordinary wildlife photographer. He is surely an excellent kayaker as well. I read about him in the “Daily Mail”, a newspaper web site recently. The story features pictures he took of humpback whales off the Alaska coast from his kayak. Humpbacks can grow as large as fifty feet long and Mr. Murrell often gets as close as fifteen feet away to snap his pictures. The humpbacks cover some distance as well and he sometimes has to paddle for 30 miles to get the images he wants. It’s an impressive collection of pictures and an amazing story. I’m not sure how long this article will be online, but if you care to read the complete story, you can click here to read the full article.

I realize that this is the ‘inflatable kayak blog’ and I know Mr. Murrell uses a hard shell kayak, but this story was so interesting, I thought it would appeal to anyone who’s ever been in an inflatable or folding kayak or any small boat for that matter. Just imagine what it would be like to be that close!