My paddling friend from Louisville, Scott Cummins, and I agreed we were ready to escape the grinds of our respective lives for a couple of days. So we met up for some camping and paddling last weekend at Land Between The Lakes. This National Recreation Area sits between Kentucky Lake, a reservoir on the Tennessee River, and Lake Barkley, an impoundment on the Cumberland River. It's roughly equidistant from our hometowns.
As I mentioned in a post back in January, Scott is now the owner of Venture Sport, Inc., an importer of racing kayaks from several South African manufacturers. He brought along a couple of boats made by the Fenn company for me to try.
I've never claimed any great expertise in canoe and kayak design. To be honest, it's just not an aspect of the sport that interests me all that much. That doesn't mean I don't consider it important to have a well-designed boat; I absolutely do. It's just that when the time comes for me to get a new boat, the process of evaluating the available designs and selecting the best one for me feels like kind of a nuisance that I want to be done with as quickly as possible so that I can get back on the water and, you know... paddle.
Over the years I've relied on this rule of thumb when shopping for a new boat: try out a few designs from the most reputable manufacturers, and go with the one that you feel most comfortable in. My rule might not be especially empirical or grounded in scientific method, but it has served me well enough. Last weekend I started out in a Sailfish, and I felt very comfortable in that boat. It was stable but also glided very nicely. After a while I switched to a Cuda, and I found it much less comfortable, mainly because of its lower primary stability. The secondary stability was good, and I never really felt like I was going to flip, but I was still expending lots of energy just keeping my balance so I could take good effective strokes. I should add that there was a great deal of slop out on Kentucky Lake from all the motorized boat traffic, especially on Saturday afternoon, so a fair amount of open-water survival skill was required.
If I were going to buy a new boat today (and I am not looking to do so at this moment, to be clear), it would seem that the Sailfish would be an obvious choice. But Scott, who is sort of the opposite of me in his enthusiasm for boat design, had a lot to say that muddied the waters for me. Like I said, it felt like the Sailfish was gliding very well, but Scott said the Cuda was the better boat in terms of hull speed. Most of the races I do in my part of the country are on flatwater and easy water, so I do want my boat for these races to have the best hull speed possible. But I also consider it very important to be comfortable in the boat, and I wasn't feeling that way in the Cuda. When I was younger, simply logging more "seat time" in a boat was all I needed to achieve a greater comfort level, but I'm finding that less effective now as I approach my 59th birthday.
Anyway... like I said, I'm not really in the market for a new boat at this time. My current boats are still in reasonably good condition, and having spent a lot of money lately on my forays into the Grand Canyon and South Africa, I'm in a mood to lay low and live simply for a while. Nevertheless, it was good for me to get out and try something new, and I'm grateful to Scott for giving me that opportunity. Hopefully in the coming months I'll have more chances to try out some boats and ready myself to make a good informed decision whenever I do spring for a new boat. I encourage anybody reading this to consider Scott and Venture Sport for future purchases of high-performance kayaks. The Venture Sport website doesn't seem to be working at this time, but you can find it on Face Book and other social media platforms.
Scott and I camped at Hillman Ferry Campground on the eastern shore of Kentucky Lake, where we enjoyed good access to the water. We paddled a couple of hours each day on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The area also has an interesting trail system, and we did a fun, if sweaty, day hike Saturday morning. We spent some time soaking up the culture of small-town western Kentucky, and conversing by the campfire in the evenings.
Of course, here in the 21st Century every great adventure must be capped with a selfie:
I'm back home in Memphis now, and was back on the Memphis riverfront Tuesday morning for a relaxed 50-minute paddle. I spent Tuesday afternoon working on a project I've had going for the last couple of months: my 110-year-old house has a lot of interior brickwork that has needed rehab work for as long as I've owned the place, and I've been "tuck-pointing," or scraping out the old crumbling mortar and replacing it with new mortar.
Wednesday morning I woke up with pain in the right side of my torso, and I'm pretty sure it was the tuck-pointing, not the paddling, I'd done on Tuesday that caused it. I'd been up on the ladder and using lots of elbow grease to press the new mortar into all the crevices I wanted to get it into, and it was just the sort of effort that could strain my oblique abdominal muscles.
Over years of following baseball, I've learned that players who sustain "oblique" injuries often end up missing lots and lots of games, so I knew I had to proceed gingerly in the boat when I went back down to the river yesterday morning. Sure enough, I was feeling a little stab of pain with each stroke on my right, so I limited myself to just 20 minutes of very easy paddling. I hoped that some light engagement of the ailing muscles would be helpful in the healing process, and since then that seems to be what's happened: this morning the area is still sore, but not nearly as bad as it was on Wednesday.
Summer begins for real this Sunday, and I'm settling in for a long, hot, and relatively quiet one.
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