Kayak Heaven - Maiden Voyage

Trip #1 - The Gorge

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For our maiden voyage, we started out near the old white school house at Craigflower and Admiral. We drove directly from the point of purchase, so we got there, parked and unwrapped the plastic off our kayaks, snapped our poles together and away we went like ducks to water!

Heading ESE, we traveled toward Victoria's Inner Harbour on The Gorge*, through Selkirk Water, Upper Harbour, getting our pacing and generally goofing around enjoying our new toys... and then reaching the Inner Harbour. We spent a good couple of hours getting to the Inner Harbour, when we got there, we took in a little street performance (juggling fire) from our watery vantage point before pushing off for the return trip back to our launch site.

Inner Harbour

Best thing to do in the Inner Harbour is to avoid things like water taxis and sea planes!

*Note: This isn't a "gorge" the way people from Rochester, NY would think of gorge... instead of 900 feet, it's more like 20 feet (in places) and usually less, so no feeling of being at a great depth at all.

Trip #1 Thoughts

GREAT. Fantastic. Wonderful maiden voyage. We goofed around a bit less on the return trip, but it still took 90 minutes. We think if it hadn't been our first time out we could shave that down to 60 minutes either way, but we DO enjoy coming along side one another for a friendly "boat-to-boat" kiss once in a while and well - our upper body strength still has some strengthening to do.

We went ashore about halfway in to town near our favorite Chinese take-out place and got a couple of cans of coke plus a liter bottle which Mark spent some of the day dragging around in his wake under the supposedly serious auspices of keeping it cooler, but the drag ratio proved too high and the bubble to liquid ratio was being degraded as well... in the meantime, it was visually hilarious to me for some reason as yet undiscovered.

There are a lot of birds along The Gorge, it's a nature sanctuary, so there's plenty of ducks and geese but the most outstanding sighting was when we paddled right by a great blue heron, at the most, 10 feet (3 meters) off to our right as we passed quietly by, it just stood there on a shallow spot and watched us go by.

Our next trip out apparently is to legalize ourselves. It seems we require life vests, signaling devices, bailers, another line and possibly a GPS the way things are going to stay on the right side of the law! It's gratifying to know we unwittingly flaunted our illegal activity right under the noses of the entire city at the Inner Harbour and lived to paddle another day!

...

Legal Paddling

Well, we are legal, picked up a couple mesh top PFDs, floatation rated to keep the Canadian Coast Guard happy, along with a couple "boating safety kits" which include required buoyant heaving lines with floats, sound signaling devices (whistles) and flashlights, all neatly stored in water-tight required bailers. No $200 fines in our future! Want to see the legal requirements for canoes and kayaks in Canada? Follow this link to the Coast Guard's safe boating information pages... there's a wealth of information to read there.

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