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Sea Kayak Trips Bulletin Board
The ice is out!
Posted By: Wes Boyd
Date: Friday, 2 April 1999, at 9:11 a.m.
Once in a while I write a column about kayaking for my paper. I don't do this very often since I suspect that a lot of my readers aren't real sure what a kayak is. However, I did write one this week about the oncoming spring, and thought I'd share it with the board. Note that this is about four trips mixed together indiscriminately.
-- Wes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The weather is warming up nicely, and we're starting to see the return of the exiles from their winter hideouts in places like Lake Panasoffkee and Apache Junction. But those of us left behind have been enjoying the weather, too. In case you were wondering, yes, I've had the kayak out. In fact, I've had it out at least once each month all winter long. This is not quite the same thing as riding a bicycle in shorts every month of the year; any idiot can do that.
Kayaking involves finding liquid water, and that proved to be a little more difficult, especially in January, when my regular kayaking buddy and I loaded up with wet suits and warm clothing, and managed to find a channel between two lakes over near Coldwater that hadn't frozen solid.
But with the ice more or less off the lakes in the last few days, we've had some interesting trips. Once again, we dress with an eye toward what would happen if the kayaks were somehow to get upset, and we tend to operate very conservatively, but a warm spring day like Saturday can bring some wonderful things to see and hear after a long winter. Even on lakes that are very busy in the summer, there's really little activity out there now, few people are around, and very often ours are the only boats on the lake. It's one of the few quiet times out there, and we like to take advantage of it.
Two weeks ago, the lake we were paddling on was well on the way toward being thawed out, but a cold, clear night had refrozen a thin skim of in some spots, and it sort of limited our range. We can break through the thin stuff, only perhaps a sixteenth of an inch thick -- and it makes a difficult to describe crunching sound when you break through it.
In our kayaks, we can't break through the older, thicker stuff, and last weekend the lake we were on still had several acres of ice stuffed back into the corner of the lake. We paddled along the front edge of the ice, which we could see was still several inches thick. Along the front of the ice was several feet of tiny chunks of ice that bounced around in the wavelets, making a beautiful tinkling noise, like the bells of spring -- the kind of thing that you don't hear very often, but is magic when you do.
There's lots else interesting out on the lakes right about now, too. The waterfowl migration is in full swing, and this time of year you often see species that are only seen when the migration is on. Yes, we have nonmigratory Canada Geese and mallards around most of the year, but any excursion to the lakes can bring up a dozen species of ducks and geese. In addition to the geese, Saturday was a big day for scaups, pintails and ruddys. We spent fifteen minutes watching a loon hunt for his lunch. We occasionally hear a loon around here in the summer, but hardly ever see one, so this was something special.
Sometimes they're out in the water in huge flocks, and sometimes the flocks are a little spooky. You can be out there, sometimes paddling maybe a quarter mile from a raft of ducks that must number in the thousands, and all of a sudden the whole flock will get spooked and take flight nearly at once. What you get then is another indescribable sound, the flutter and patter of hundreds of wings taking off. It's like the water comes alive -- an awesome sight.
Some waterfowl get off the water pretty good. Mallards, especially, are like little jump jets, exploding directly off the water up to an altitude of several feet before they transition into forward flight. Other waterfowl, such as, say, scaups and coots, aren't quite as good, and have to run across the top of the water to get up speed for takeoff. Coots, in fact, take an awful long time to get off of the water, if they make it at all.
But the geese are the most interesting birds, in my humble opinion. The migratory birds tend to be a little wary, and you can't get real close to them before they blast off the water in a burst of squawking and complaint, but the nonmigratory ones aren't quite as sensitive, and sometimes you can get pretty close to them.
The nonmigratory Canada Geese around here aren't just geese that are too lazy to head north for the summer; they are, in face an entirely separate subspecies, the "Giant" Canada Goose -- that forty years ago was thought to be extinct, until a flock of them was discovered on a lake in Minnesota. That they have come back so far in that time -- far enough to be considered a pest in some places -- says a lot about wildlife management practices.
It's getting on toward nesting season for the Giant Canadas -- they don't have to deal with the short summers and extreme weather that influence their northern-nesting cousins.
As the snow melts, the males and females begin searching for nest sites. Giants prefer to nest on islands, pond shorelines, or small mounds of vegetation near water, but Giants are really not very choosy about location, and especially in urban areas will sometimes nest quite close to human activity. Stock ponds or urban settings are quite satisfactory, and people have gotten familiar with this large, interesting, bird.
There's always something interesting to see out on the lake, this time of year, or any time of year. This week, it finally begins to looks as if winter is behind us, and now, like the geese, we non-migratory people can look forward to better things to come while the migratory people head north.
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