Inflatable Kayak Blog

(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.

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!

Jim Schutze is a writer from Texas who purchased a Puffin Kayak from PortableKayaks.com. He was kind enough to allow us to share the story of his paddling trip to Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario in August of 2009.

We planned our six-man canoe trip into Quetico Provincial Park in Ontario for a year before assembling in Ely, Minnesota at the end of August, 2009. Quetico, the Canadian half of the boundary waters canoe area, controls entry much more strictly than the American side. You have to make reservations months in advance just to get in. Then you must persuade the Canadians to give you a “remote area border crossing permit.” You had better hope you have never had a drunk driving conviction, or they won’t give you the pass. (That eliminated some of my favorite candidates for the trip.) Then on your day of entry you must keep an appointment with provincial park authorities at a remote crossing point on the international border.

Our group – four old guys and a middle aged guy — was thrown for a loop when one member had to bail at the last minute because of a blown-up knee. He was to have been my canoe-mate. The normal solution would have been for three of us to go out in a Minnesota three-man canoe. I just didn’t want to do that. Some of my distaste for the idea was based on a misunderstanding of the “Minny Three,” which I thought would weigh a third more than the two-man Kevlars. Our age range in the group was 57 to 83, not counting the guide. I thought the three-man would be difficult to portage. I was wrong. They weigh only a few pounds more, maybe 47 pounds instead of 43 or 44. But, ehh … what can I say? Rub-a-dub-dub. I still think three men in one tub is too many. So I told everybody I had this kayak I could bring on the plane. I did not tell them that I had just purchased my Pakboat Puffin 12 from Portablekayaks.com and that it had never been in the water. They only learned that fact as the sound of the outfitter’s motorboat was fading in the distance, with the wilderness looming ahead. I detected signs of consternation.

I zipped the deck off the Puffin, pulled everything out of my 45-pound portage pack, stuffed all of it into the boat and in deck bags, and away we went. We had headwinds to buck, white caps and cross currents coming out of the river we were trying to get up into. The guide looked plenty concerned about me and my boat. The end of the story is this: the Puffin 12 did a yeoman job of carrying me out into Quetico. Especially when it was heavily loaded, the boat handled all kinds of water and wind very well.

Quetico is thousands of lakes separated by rocky portage paths, with granite shelves and outcroppings lurking beneath the surface of the water everywhere. I did my best to protect the hull of the Puffin, but I couldn’t avoid a few bumps and scrapes, which it shrugged off with barely a scratch mark. At one key point, the guide had to get out and line the two canoes up a rapids by rope. I was able to paddle up the rapids with one small assist from the guide where I had a tight corner to make. I think I would have made it on my own had he not helped. On the way home I shot the rapids while the others tramped through the woods.

Portaging was a challenge. I took the deck off and tried to carry the Puffin over my head, which meant on my head. A younger man might have managed this better. I found that at 63 years of age I was not comfortable clambering over rocky trails wearing a 21-pound hat. Eventually, however, I devised a system by which I carried the boat on a shoulder, balanced by a bungee cord to one of the forward d-rings. I tied socks around the frame joints where they dug into my shoulders. It didn’t occur to me until I was on the plane home that I should have carried the boat while wearing my portage pack, which has thick padded shoulder straps, instead of carrying it with a smaller lighter duffel bag in one hand. My fellow travelers got tired of waiting for me to pack and unpack the boat at portages. One of them wisely suggested I not do that and just dump my Duluth pack in their canoe instead. That worked well and speeded up the portages, although my boat handled less well, at first, without the weight.

Every boat and paddler must come together over just the right stroke, and I didn’t work that out until the last days of the trip. When I did – a longer stroke, sweeping back closer to the hull – the handling problems went away and I made good speed with good tracking. Before I got the stroke down, I had trouble keeping up with the canoes, sometimes lagging a full lake behind them, which meant they had to wait for me at the portages. Once I got my stroke, I kept up easily.

As gentle as I tried to be with the boat, I still dropped it and banged it on trees and bumped it on boulders on the portages. No element of the frame ever popped out of place. It sat upside down in the sun for three days at our base camp, after which the sponsons were deflated very slightly. I pumped them back up, and they remained taut.

I got lots of comments from other canoeists, mainly along the line of, “What is that?”
All in all, I was very pleased with the Puffin 12, extremely proud of it for carrying me and my gear so well on a nine-day expedition with lots and lots of portaging. I am tempted to go back out into Quetico on solo trips, which most people do by paddling a Prism one-man Kevlar or similar canoe. But I sure am fond of my Puffin 12, and I’m thinking seriously of trying a solo in it.

The other question I got from the other people who saw me carrying the Puffin kayak on the portages was, “How much does that thing weigh?” When I said, “‘21 pounds’ (without the deck),” I could see obvious envy on their faces – especially the ones anywhere near my age. Envy and a big light bulb. I predict in years ahead there will be more gray-beards in Pakboats in Quetico. I would say, “more girls,” also, but all the girls we saw out there were stronger than us.

On our recent trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, we took a side trip to visit my sister-in-law in Ontonagon, about an hour away from Hubbell where we were staying. She fixed us a lunch and we had a nice visit. Her son has a cabin on the Firesteel River and he had invited us to stop by and put the kayak in while we were in the area. He had told us that it was a great place to kayak and that he thought we would enjoy the quiet and scenic area.

We drove to the cabin, got out and inflated our Sea Eagle 330, launching from a little area where some hard shell kayaks rested on the bank. It really was a great place to kayak! The river was fairly wide with pretty twists and turns and wilderness all around. We only came across a few houses all the while we were paddling. We kept waiting for a deer and fawn to be standing along the bank drinking water, but that never did happen, though I’m sure there were plenty of deer in the area, the timing wasn’t right. We paddled up river to begin our trip and went for quite some time before we headed back. When we got back to the cabin we decided to go down stream a bit, seeing it was so pretty. It was windy and being on the river in the wind was different than on a lake. Wind also affects inflatable kayaks more than folding or hard shell kayaks. At one place the wind was behind us, but as we turned a bend, the direction of the wind changed and we would be heading into the wind. Unfortunately, we didn’t feel comfortable enough yet with our new sail to take it along with us on a small river, but it might have come in handy on that part of the trip.

We did see some ducks and a few turtles sunning themselves on a log along the way. I got out the camera and took some shots as best I could in the windy conditions. We didn’t make it all the way where the river empties into Lake Superior on this trip.  Maybe if we get down that way again we can do that. When we did turn around it was difficult paddling in some areas because the wind was really blowing against us. That and the fact that we had stayed out longer than we normally do and I think we were more tired than we normally are, made the trip back to the dock seem even longer.

We usually paddle in lakes and more open water. Although we’ve been on rivers before, this was our first time on a really nice river and it makes me think we should try to search out and paddle some rivers more often.

We went on an extended weekend to Gatlinburg, TN this past weekend. We were able to get in a paddle at Douglas Lake, but one of our other plans was to go for a hike in Smokey Mountain National Park. We asked at the visitor’s center for suggestions of somewhere not too strenuous, preferably something along one of the pretty mountain streams. We chose to go to the Elkmont area. There was a wide, well-groomed trail along the rocky mountain stream. Most of the trail was in the shade of the tall spring green trees with the sun peeking through the trees here and there. I loved walking along listening to the sound of the rushing water while butterflies were flitting everywhere. There were old abandoned cabins scattered in the woods just off the path that added to the charm of the area. As I was taking pictures of the stream, we noticed a young man in something like an inner tube floating calmly down towards us in the shallow areas and then slipping over the rocks as he went over a little waterfall. We had never before seen anyone do that in a mountain stream, so we stayed and watched him float by. We couldn’t help making the comparison to a float tube for fishing. Though this wasn’t exactly the same, he was definitely in a tube that was floating. It looked like fun and a great way to spend a little bit of time in the Smokey’s, but I think I will stay with kayaking.

The system of “water ratings” or “whitewater ratings” was designed so boaters and more appropriately, paddlers would know the difficulty of certain lakes, rivers and rapids. Here are some detailed descriptions of the whitewater rating system. Matching the ratings with the manufacturers recommendations for your hard shell, inflatable or folding kayak will ensure enjoyable paddling adventures.

Class A – Waters are calm and still, which is the case for most lakes and rivers.

Class I – These rapids are small and have slightly fast moving water. There are hardly any dangerous spots and those that are dangerous are easily spotted and avoidable. The risk to swimmers is small and can be corrected by self-rescue. In other words there is nothing to worry about in a Class I rapid.

Class II – With some basic training the obstacles in this class are easily maneuvered around or avoided. The swifter currents of water, channels, and rapids are easily noticed with some forward scouting. Swimmers will probably not get hurt in these rapids. It rarely occurs that someone may need outside assistance for rescue.

Class III – Accomplished whitewater skills and/or training are needed for these rapids. Constant changing rapids, harsh currents, large obstacle, and tight channels are prevalent. Larger rapids and currents can be seen but avoided. Risk to swimmers is still minimal and can be rescued by group or individually.

Class IV – These large and predictable currents require very strong boating skills. Some large waves, holes, and currents may be unavoidable. Quick thinking and fast skills are a must. Depending on water conditions the risk to swimmers can be high.

Class V – Expert only. These rapids put the boater into extreme danger. Large holes, rocks, waves, and currents are violent and all have an added danger. Rapids are longer and much more intense. Swimming is dangerous and not recommended.

Class VI – These rapids are unpredictable and may never have been run before. The only paddling here should be attempted by professionals under perfect conditions.

Fall is a great time to do some paddling. The changing colors make for some beautiful scenery and the cooler temperatures keep the sweating level down. We’re headed up to Michigan for a few days and we’re looking forward to a few paddling adventures, enjoying the fall weather and color in our Sea Eagle 330 Inflatable Kayak. It’s a little different than our previous trips to Florida and Tennessee in warmer weather. We’re going to have to wear our clothing in layers, since the temperature can vary with the amount of paddling activity, time of day, and if a piece of clothing gets wet (as if that’s ever happened!). If anyone has any additional ‘tips’ for fall paddling, drop us a note.

We’ll post a few blogs along the way. There’s lots of water in Michigan and we plan to enjoy some of it.

I had been out in the country with a friend, checking out a new house they were having built and we passed the Blue River. I noticed that it was up and looked like it might be fun to check it out in the kayak. This would have been a new place to kayak and we tentatively planned on going out on Sunday.

As it turned out, it was a good thing that we didn’t make it to the river. Although it wasn’t forecasted to be nearly as strong as it was, the remnants of hurricane Ike slammed in to our area with winds gusting 70 to 80 miles per hour. Trees and power lines were down everywhere and most of the area will be without power for days to come. Just thinking of being out on the river in that kind of weather is unimaginable. This will serve as a reminder to be sure to check weather conditions before leaving on a kayaking trip. It is better to change plans and be safe rather than get caught out in dangerous conditions.

We had been talking about taking the kayak for a paddle on the Ohio River. It was a hot and humid evening and we could have put it off but we finally had some free time, so we packed up the boat and headed to a spot at Leavenworth, Indiana to put the boat in the water.

We have crossed the Ohio River many times on our way into Louisville and my first thoughts were that there would be a swift current and the water wouldn’t be too nice, maybe some driftwood to avoid. But the place we went was very calm, the water quality was better than I expected and it was mostly free of debris. We didn’t come across anything hazardous floating anywhere near us.

The thing that amazed me about this trip was how wide the river really is. When you are crossing it on a bridge you are over it in a matter of seconds, but being in a small inflatable kayak out on the water is quite a different story. Though we didn’t venture very far from the shoreline, to paddle to the other side would have taken quite a while, I’m sure. Because it is so wide, there is a unique quality to the river but it is not overly scenic. There were a lot of fish jumping after the bugs that were along the top of the water and we passed what looked like a small abandoned barge resting on the riverbank. It had been there for some time judging from the trees that were growing in and around it. But the most interesting sighting was a very large bird that flew up from the shore. It was gone before we had a chance to get a good look at it, but we wondered if there were any eagles in the area. We’ll have to do some research on that notion.

This wasn’t a very long paddle, but we both agreed that we would go back there, maybe on a cooler evening for a longer trip.