I can’t remember the last time I went kayaking. Having nightmare recollections of ‘near-death’ experiences put me off for a while, so it could well be a few years since I’ve ventured near one. Now, at Lake Tahoe, I had the chance to rectify that.
The kayak place on Baldwin Beach rented out double ‘sit on tops’, i.e. you don’t have to don the full kayak skirt and strap yourself in, you just do as it says on the tin. Sit on top. Given the weather, sunny and warm, this was perfectly suited to our needs. In fact, we found that the drops of water drizzling down the paddle, gently splashing our legs was pleasantly cooling in the late morning sun.
The push off from shore was smooth and calm, launching us oh so gradually into the still clear water of Lake Tahoe. After an initial momentary angst, I experienced an almost drug-induced sense of euphoria. My inner sense of kayaking joy – long buried, re-surfaced as we glided along. My paddle dipped and plopped into the water either side, propelling us forward with a rhythmical grace. This was my true calling! I am a kayaker! I was born for kayaking!
Short-lived though it was, that initial exhilaration was memorable. After that came an acknowledgement of the hours to come, the effort, the exertion, driving from the shoulders and the hips. Darren’s advice: imagine there’s a monkey sat square on right in front of you, so you’re not just pushing back with the paddle in the water but you’re also ‘punching the monkey’ with your other fist, driving the airborne side of the paddle forward. We’d been shown a map before we left, so we had a rough idea of where we were going. The rental guy had ominously mentioned that this is the busiest place for water traffic in the whole of Lake Tahoe, so we might want to continue beyond the map boundary, at which point we would find a cool waterfall.
He wasn’t kidding about the busy bit. Having taken our lives in our hands to traverse Emerald Bay, we continued with Operation Cool Waterfall. Ever the optimist, Darren insisted it was just around the next headland. Proved wrong for the second and again a third time, we found ourselves in ‘Just one more headland’-land. Rounding number four, not a waterfall in sight, let alone a cool one. The adrenaline-fueled energy I had on the way out visibly drained from my body as we faced the long kayak home and exhaustion set in, the palms of my hands sore and inflamed from the abrasion of the paddle.
The increasing grouch level due to the onset of tiredness compounded my new pet hate: power boats. Devils in disguise. Each kayaking trip (in my experience at least) has its challenges. In the past we’ve had storms, we’ve had wind, we’ve had currents, we’ve had traffic. Power boat traffic is something else. If it was up to me, no one would be granted a power boat license without first hand experience of the impact a power boat has on an unpowered craft such as a kayak.
To the innocent bystander, power boats look appealing, they look cool, they look fast. To the kayaker, they look mean, they look disruptive, and they look even faster. Step one: establish eye contact, make sure they’ve seen you in your tiny yet fluorescent kayak, to avoid the risk of being mown down and chopped into tiny pieces, your greatest achievement in life being to feed the fish in death. Step two: when a direct hit is unlikely, disregard your plotted course entirely and instead turn the kayak to face the power boat’s wake so as to avoid being capsized from a wave hitting you on the side. Step three: on approaching the power boat’s wake, forget you’re even in a kayak, ride that mother wave like a champion surfboarder, and punch the monkey like there’s no tomorrow.
With The Kayakers Guide to the Power Boat Galaxy firmly committed to memory, it was all well and good when I was on tip top form, bursting with energy and raring to go at the start of the trip. Not so good after one headland too many! Long story short, Step one: nope, no eye contact. Step two: Look that wave in the face, check. Oh hang on, that’s not a wave, it’s a wall of water akin to a tsunami! Step three: um, not a lot of wave riding going on. I had nothing left in me to power through the likes of that, and with a look of sheer horror on my face, I very quickly lost momentum. The monkey had won and I resigned myself to being engulfed by the lake.
The remarkable thing about wide, squat, sit on top kayaks is their unmatched stability. Not to mention Darren’s role in paddling like a mad thing, sat right behind me. Point being, we remained joyfully upright, and even though I resembled a drowned rat having taken the brunt of the wave, Darren remained smugly dry. I was duly chastised, not only for my poor paddling skills but also as we then had to rescue my water bottle bobbing in the lake some way away, having not been bungeed down properly. Maybe I’m not so cut out for this kayaking lark after all.
With my motivation as well as my energy on a downward spiral, we limped back to shore. Quite honestly, if you could fall asleep in a kayak, that would have been my moment. The sun was still beating down, so the rays and the the breeze helped me to dry out. The heat also made me prone to mild hallucinations… in my head I was a majestic iguana basking in the sun’s rays, merely going through the physical motions of tipping my paddle from side to side.
Once on dry land and with subsequent time to reflect, I like to remember the good as well as the bad. Whilst I have been known to create a melodrama out of a crisis, this was not quite on a par with the near death experience level of previous kayak trips. In fact a positive success then! The only real long-lasting downside was the rather unattractive shade of lobster red that our legs turned later in the day. Maybe sit on tops are not so ‘perfectly suited’ to sunny weather after all.
