"Maybe you're not as retarded as I made you out to be"

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a kayak and it finally arrived last week. Gregg and I have been itching to take it out for a spin, so Sat we went to Elkhorn Slough near Moss Landing for a trial run. Its a two-person inflatable kayak, so took us a little bit to get it all pumped up and ready to go. There were a few different parts - the kayak itself, the seats that were separately inflatable and inserted into the kayak, and of course the paddles. Now, I should preface this whole story by saying that neither of us are really avid kayakers (Gregg had never gone before Sat, and I can count the number of times on one hand). Also, neither of us are particularly active in general anymore so we probably have no business engaging in strenuous exercise to begin with.

But anyway, we inflated the kayak in the parking lot and set off.

The first problem we encountered almost immediately was that we couldn't get the kayak to face forward. I was sitting in the back so was technically steering, I suppose, but no matter what we do, we ended up doing little donuts and facing backwards. And also, Gregg's seat deflated almost instantly and kept sliding down, so that it felt like he was doing crunches whenever he paddled. So we decided that maybe we should try switching places and looked around for some place to pull over. Of course, there wasn't any, so decided to just switch on the go by turning around and moving our seats over. So basically, G would take the middle seat out, move it towards his end and turn around so that we were facing different directions and he was in the back. Not sure if that makes any sense, but basically, we had switched it up so the back of the kayak was in the opposite side, he was steering and I was in front. The plan had diaster written all over it, but actually turned out ok.

There was a HUGE difference almost immediately. I don't know how long I had to put up G making fun of my steering abilities. It had to have been at least 10 minutes before he felt underneath the kayak and realized on his side, there were these little fins that were supposed to be in the back of the kayak and guide the steering. So really we had just set the seats up wrong in the beginning and that's why we were doing donuts up the slough. So you'd think that at this point, I'd get a little apology for all the ribbing. All I got was, "Hmm, maybe you're not as retarded as I made you out to be." See what I have to put up with?!?

Anyway, the trip was much better after that for a while. We were going in the direction of the wind and current, so we basically just coasted. Definitely our kind of exercise! But then we stopped for lunch at the end of the Slough near some railroad tracks and that's when we realized how deflated our kayak was! It looked seriously sad. Some guy actually pulled over on the road on the other side of the slough while we were eating and asked if we were ok.

We hadn't even thought to bring the pump with us either! But we figured it'd be ok, we'd just get a little wet. Famous last thoughts, I guess, because we couldn't have been paddling long on the way back before we realized that we so were not ok. First of all, the wind was blowing against us now, so it wasn't as easy. And then, the kayak was pretty deflated, so we didn't have much to work with. Basically we kept paddling and paddling but not making any progress. So we didn't know what to do. At some point, we gave up and thought we'd just paddle over to one side and see if we couldn't leave the kayak somewhere, walk back, and then come back and get it with our car. Seemed like an all right plan, except that it took forever to get over to the side with it being all marshy and thick with weeds. And then once we got there, we realized we weren't anywhere close to the road! So then we were stuck walking along the railroad tracks with the kayak!

We tried it for a while and then just decided that paddling was probably the lesser of two evils and got back to that. Made it back eventually. Actually I think we'd made more progress than we realized too because even by the time we jumped back in, we could see the parking lot in the distance. So I guess we had that going for us. When we finally made it back, we were deflating the kayak to head home (although at that point, it was pretty much all the way deflated anyway) we noticed a big vent that we had left completley open the whole time. Doh!