Is Kayaking Awestom?

Kayaking can be good, bad, ugly, and even awestom. It can also lead to awestom experiences.

There is a place on the South Shore of St. Croix which is ideal to learn to kayak. It is also a place to get close to god, nature, mother earth or your favorite deity as there are very few proofs of modern man. It’s not the easiest place to kayak as there is a wind and current which works against you. The reason it’s a great place to learn is that it is a shallow bay that you enter from the west end and as you kayak to the east the wind and current send you back to your starting point. If you flip the kayak, the water is only about 3-7 feet deep so just stand up and start again.

I took a total amateur from Oklahoma (Sharon, Carson’s Mom) who works with Indian kids and she loved it. When I showed her an eroded bank where you could find pottery pieces from the Danish era (pre-1917) and a foot or two lower you could find Indian pottery Pre-Columbus) with conch shells and whelk shells showing what they ate and where, she was ecstatic and couldn’t thank me enough. It was kind of awestom watching her emotional experience as she picked up pottery pieces to take back to Oklahoma to bring pre-Columbian Indian pottery back to her tribe for them to actually handle instead of look at in a museum.

I had another awestom kayaking experience in the same area. While at the eroded area, I saw pelicans diving on something in a feeding frenzy. Seems in the most unlikely of places for life to start, turtles were hatching on a sand, stone, rubble beach and as they entered the water the pelicans were doing their job feeding on an endangered species. I decided to work with the underdog and started throwing stones at the pelicans.

I noticed a fisherman who earned his living from the sea and called him. He came with his girlfriend and we all started throwing stones at the birds. He had a dog that was so excited by seeing us excited that he kept on jumping up and down and never recognized the turtles as a life form. Fortunately, we were able to shoo him away and he never harmed a turtle. All the time the fisherman was throwing stones at the pelicans, he was shouting, “Awesome, F*#%*ing Awesome!”

Perhaps one of my favorite days Kayaking can be classified as good, perhaps even great but short of awestom. Seems that Elizabeth Armstrong of the Buccaneer Resort organizes a five mile sea swim starting at Buck Island which is 3 miles off shore and ending at the Buccaneer in Christiansted which is five miles away. It was a beautiful day, calm seas and a gentle breeze. Every amateur in the world was out to help mark the course. There were ladies with parasols in a double kayak just drifting with the wind. With prior arrangement, you didn’t even have to kayak the three miles out to Buck Island at 5 am. You could have caught a yacht out and drifted back into town in the kayak which had been transported to Buck Island on a fishing boat. It really wasn’t kayaking as I know it, but it was a cool community outing. The purpose of the kayaks in an open water swim is to mark the course and assist swimmers in trouble. I’m not sure that most of the people on the ocean that day could even save themselves from harms way or knew where the course was.

The next outing classifies as both Awestom and Ugly. Once again, it was an event staged by the Buccaneer and it was a 10 mile swim, five miles against the wind and current to Buck Island and then back. Only this was a day to tax the endurance of everyone involved except the swimmers. There was a ferocious wind and the current was wicked. The swimmers handled it rather well as there wind resistance was close to zero. The real issue was the wind and waves. The swimmers never noticed the 10-12 swells as they were only 6 inches out of the water. It’s kind of a thrill to handle a 12′ long ocean going kayak in that kind of sea, particularly when you are heading directly into the rough water.

All good things must come to an end and my 20 year old female partner started to get sea sick and stopped rowing. The swimmer we were supposed to be protecting was pulling way ahead of us and while I tried to stay on the water and generally with the pack, I took it as a sign from God that it was time to quit when she started puking and it was blowing back in my face. It’s hard enough to be controlling a double kayak alone in 10-12 foot swell but that was just to darn much. I was the first to quit, at about the 2 mile mark but by the 4 mile mark the race was canceled as too dangerous. By the way, if you’re a female that’s a hell of a way to discover you’re pregnant and prone to morning sickness which which was the case.

I would definitely have to classify that trip as somewheres between awestom and ugly.

When you Kayak, not only do you have to know your partner but you have to know yourself. The next day I wasn’t really ecstatic about spending 8 hours on a rough sea without a partner to talk to but I had promised to be one of the course marshals. I love to commune with nature for about 2 hours but after that it’s either time to get to work or get social. On another occasion I was out for 5 hours in a 15- 20 mile per hour head wind and 1-3 foot swells and my very talkative partner kept it fun. However on this day, I was positioned on the leeward side of a cape with slight swells in the 1-3 foot range and the wind was steady out of the east at about 10 miles an hour. There wasn’t another person in close proximity. I was in the water about 6 hours when I moved closer to the rocky shore to sips some water. I raised the bottle up and in slow motion became disoriented and flipped the Kayak.

Now at best pulling yourself back on top of an Ocean going Kayak is tough, but when you’re tired after 6 hours at sea it’s impossible. My choices were to swim about 100 feet to a very nasty cliff like beach or swim a half mile to shore to a nice sandy beach. Needless to say, I chose the dumb path and swam to the sandy beach towing my Kayak behind me. Since all the support boats were out protecting the swimmers, there was nobody around to save me. My wife was in a panic on the shore line when I finally made it in (Kayak and all) because she could not get any of the race officials to help me.

Well that’s the last weekend that I went deep water open ocean Kayaking. Yeah, I could save myself and even save a pregnant 2o year old girl, but it simply wasn’t fun – Awestom maybe but just over the edge on the ugly side which real awestom is never supposed to be. I’ve been kayaking since but not deep water open ocean. I plan on going out this December when seas and winds are rough and again for a major event covering about 10 miles of the deepest nastiest sea you would want to kayak in but those are challenges and stories for another day.

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