Louise and I drove there listening to a CD I'd made of songs from various "Simpsons" episodes. It didn't go over as well as I thought it would. This really has nothing to do with the paddle, but it does set up my closing joke for this paddle report.
Here's Bernie's new boat. We haven't made fun about how pink Paula's new boat is, so it wouldn't be fair to make fun of how yellow Bernie's boat is.
Unfortunately, Bernie's new boat doesn't have any room to store gear so he has to keep it all on his deck. Ha! I'm kidding -- got ya!
Actually, it looks like he has quite a lot of room for storage using his own patented design for the hatch covers. And as Bernie says, he'd rather have a kayak that when upside down looks big, yellow and unnatural than like a piece of driftwood.
Here's Bernie boat in action.
Paula is still enjoying her new Eliza.....
...while Louise just can't wait to get going.
This was my first paddle with my new carbon shaft. (You heard right, ladies.) I picked it up at the Ocean River sale a couple of weeks ago. I love it. It's a little shorter than my usual paddle (a 240cm paddle, down from a 245cm paddle), so that took a a little getting used to. But it sure is light and strong.
It was a sunny day when we started -- here's the picture to prove it.
We made it to Flower Island and were planning to cross to Jemmy Jones Island. Louise was having contact lens trouble, one had fallen out, and so her vision was not reliable. The wind had come up and was making waves, not enough to be a real issue, but enough to combine with her lens trouble and put Louise out of her comfort zone. So while Paula and Bernie headed out to Jemmy Jones, Louise and I stayed behind at Flower.
This gave me a chance to try out my other new piece of equipment, a new Sony DSC-H9 digital camera. I've retired my film camera. I just paid $75 to develop three rolls of film, get one set of prints each and a digital scanning of each roll. So this camera will save me money, save a little piece of the environment, and it has a monster zoom lens on it to take some great pictures. Check out this heron!
We saw these gulls that we've not seen before. They looked like regular seagulls, but were gray and smaller with bright orange beaks. They also sounded like they were barking when they chirped.
Bernie came in close to check out the gulls.
We headed back to shore as the wind came up.
We headed to the beach and to the end of our quick paddle, but as you have probably guessed, by the time we got the kayaks all loaded up, the sun came out again.
Next week, we had the idea to paddle at....never mind, maybe it's more of a Shelbyville paddle idea...
My photos are here.
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