A Weekend on the Water

For a long time we have been wondering about my use of a canoe or a kayak. My arms are plenty strong but I am uncertain about the strength of my trunk and how much of that strength would be required to move a kayak. We have also been very concerned about the problem of how to get into the boat. I thought long and hard about the issue of kayak versus canoe. Kayaks are stable, put your body close to the water rather than on a seat. Kayaks offer the disadvantage of, for most designs, having a relatively small hole to get your legs into complicating the problem of getting into the boat. Normally you would sit on the seats of a canoe which would be extremely awkward. If you could sit on some cushions in the bottom of the canoe, the problem of getting into the boat would be considerably simpler.

This weekend we went camping with some friends at a house on the waterfront on Whidbey

Island. In addition to many other amenities, the house had a couple of kayaks. One was a conventional single person kayak with a relatively small hole. The other was a two-person kayak designed to be sat upon. This design so many of the issues of getting into the boat. with seven able-bodied people it was easy enough to roll the wheelchair down to the beach and have a few people left me into the kayak. After that with some more help the kayak was pulled into the water and launched. it was not an elegant solution and not necessarily one that would be easy to repeat but it worked.

Once in the water I discovered that paddling a kayak was very easy. In fact, I made the mistake of insisting that my wife stay in the back of the boat to enable her to steer if I had a hard time paddling. This was a mistake because Verna is not very good at steering boats, she almost never rode in the stern before my accident. and throughout our trip she continually complained about an inability to steer, forcing me to do much of the steering from the front.

One problem that we discovered with this sit up on kayak is that while the craft is self bailing it is also very wet. The good news is that all of the cold water tended to fall on my legs and specifically the parts of my legs that are not sensitive to cold (or anything else). The bad news is it meant that I was losing a lot of heat without necessarily feeling. The other good news is that it was a sunny day and for Seattle relatively warm. One thing that I learned is that hypothermia is a problem and that the self bailing sit on kayak is probably not the best solution.

Kayaking was extremely successful and I am now in the process of looking for more reproducible ways to get into a canoe or a kayak without having a lot of people to help.