Inflatable Kayak Blog

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!

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!

The key to kayaking in the ocean, no matter what type of kayak you have, folding or otherwise, is more about the paddler than about the kayak. Ocean currents and waves create more of a challenge than the water in most lakes and rivers. Conditions can change more quickly and the power of the ocean’s deeper water is much more formidable. If the water is calm and the forecast is good, most everyone can kayak. The decision making process becomes more crucial when those conditions are borderline and the waves are a little higher, etc. At that point, paddling experience and confidence in your paddling abilities is really the key to whether you should attempt an ocean or sea-kayaking paddle. You can gain some experience by ‘testing’ your kayak in light waves, gradually progressing to see how your skills match up with larger waves. Stay in areas where conditions are more predictable and close enough to shore to feel secure in the ‘testing’ process. Over time, you’ll be able to decide what types of ocean conditions you’ll be confident to kayak in.

I’ve spoken with the manufacturers of the PakBoat and TRAK folding kayaks that we sell at PortableKayaks.com and they have assured me that all their kayaks are safe for ocean kayaking as long as the paddler has experience enough to handle them. So, if you know you can handle it, “happy ocean paddling!”

What I enjoyed most of our time on our trip to Destin was walking on the beach just far enough into the water to get my feet wet. We took long walks along the white sandy beach every day. We always passed people fishing from the shore and wondered if anyone ever caught anything as we hadn’t ever seen anyone with a catch. It was after the sun had set one evening and we were on one of our walks. As we passed a fisherman it looked like he just might have some thing on his line. After talking to someone that was in his group we found out that he thought he had a pretty big shark on his line. He had been out fishing in his kayak all day to catch some bait. Just before sunset he went out again in his kayak and sent out his line with the bait fish on it in hopes of catching a shark. We had never seen anyone catch a shark, so we waited around the hour that it took him to land the fish. What a sight to finally see the white fin cut through the water when it was pulled in close to shore. The shark was about five feet long and certainly worth waiting around to see. We got some pictures of the proud fisherman, a Destin native, and the shark and then he let it go.

Destin is a great place to take an inflatable kayak. There are so many wonderful places to get out and explore. One launching spot is at a little park that was on the bay near where it meets the Gulf. The water was a beautiful blue-green color and fairly calm which was good considering it was only our third time in the boat. We were getting better at paddling together and feeling a little more comfortable with the way the boat handled. We paddled along the shore checking out all the beautiful homes. There were pelicans all around and we loved seeing them flying over head.  At one spot we saw a blue heron on the shore and paddled closer to get a good look. We noticed that there were several more herons roosting in the trees all around this area. There were so many places that we could have explored, but still not feeling all that proficient in the boat we stayed close to shore and didn’t venture out too far or nearer the gulf. We’ll save those neat places for next time we’re in Destin.

After about 45 minutes in the boat we headed back to shore to pack things up. There was a neat restaurant, Dewey Destin, on the water that we were told had great seafood so we went there for lunch. As we were eating on the dock we noticed that there were dolphins swimming right in the area we had just kayaked in. How neat that would have been if we were out there when the dolphins were swimming by. That’s now become one of our goals … to paddle with the dolphins some day!