Minor crisis in the Yaquina Bay

Beth, the kids, and I were having a great time kayaking the Yaquina Bay in Newport.  The weather was perfect, traffic in the bay was minimal, and everyone was excited for another outing on the water.  We put into the bay just north of the Hatfield Marine Science Center and began paddling east into the bay.   The gentle flood tide helped to carry us along.

The tide level was quite low.  The kids were able to see clams in the few inches of water we were paddling in.  The mud flats, barely covered in sea water, stretched out several hundred yards to the shore line.  At least two dozen great blue herons were picking there way through the flats looking for lunch.  The paddling was great, but we didn't have a good place to let the kids out for a stretch.  After we had been out for about 1.5 hours Aaron started getting antsy. Given that we didn't have any place to let the kids out, Beth and I decided to turn around and head back.  The tide had not turned back yet, but we didn't have the time to wait.  Aaron was not going to last that long.  About 10 minutes into the return trip was all Aaron could handle.  Not known for his patience (being 2.5 yrs old at the time), Aaron starting crying up a storm.  He wanted off the boats and he wanted it NOW.  In that moment Beth and I stopped thinking like kayakers and start thinking like parents with an upset child.

It has always been our habbit of removing our kids from situation when they are having problems.  In the store, resturaunt, or other places one of us will remove the child who is having problems and deal with the issue to calm them down outside of the environment which may have caused or contributed to their problem.  In this case being on the boat for too long was the cause and the solution was to get off.  The only place to get off was back were we launched the boats.  Given that I am the stronger paddler in the faster boat, Beth asked me to take Aaron and head back as fast as I could.  She would follow behind.  Focusing on the state of distress Aaron was in I agreed and took off as fast as I could, keeping in mind that I could not exhaust my body halfway there.  Even with no sight-seeing and going full speed I was an easy 30 minutes away from landing the boat.  This is the point where we made a bad situation worse.

Most really good problems are caused by a series of mistakes/events that all intersect in space and time.  I have found that it generally takes about 3 mistakes/events to create a crisis. 

Mistake #1
We were too far away from a put-in to give the kids a break.  While Patrick can handle it (but may not be happy about it), Aaron is not old enough to handle long paddling outings.  We had planned on staying close enough to the shore to let the kids out, but with the low tide there was an easy hundred yards of mud flats between us and the bank.


Mistake #2
We split up. We piled both kids in my kayak so that I could get them back to the beach.  When Aaron started having problems we started thinking like parents and not like kayakers.  I was wearing a tow rope that I would have hooked up to Beth's boat had she been having a hard time paddling, but the problem we were fixing was not her ability to paddle, or keep up.  We were taking care of a child who had been on the boat long enough.

Mistake #3
Beth tried to keep up.  She pushed her ability beyond what she could sustain.  Disregarding all other elements, her sit-on-top kayak was just not going to go as fast as the rest of us were in the tandem.  Complicated by the tide going against us, Beth exhausted herself while still having a good distance left to go.  While I kept looking over my shoulder at her, I was too far away to see that she was having problems.  She was able to make it back to the shore unassisted but she would not have made it much further.

Lesson #1
Be more aware of time and distance for the kids needs.  There was nothing wrong with the location of our outing, but we should have been more aware of the time needed to get to shore.  We were enjoying the area so much that we lost track of how long we were on the water and how far we had to go.  We would have been better off identifying that there was no good location to let the kids out and paddling around closer to our launch point.

Lesson #2
Never split up.  I had a tow belt, but I didn't think to use it as Beth was not having a problem paddling.  I could have hooked up to her boat and towed her and Aaron while she stopped paddling to take care of Aaron.  In any event staying together would have helped us avoid bigger problems even though one of our kids was no longer having a good time.

Lesson #3
Pace yourself for the distance needed to travel.  As I was pulling away, Beth felt the need to push herself harder to keep up.  Focusing on my kayak instead of our final destination made her push her physical limits beyond what she could sustain.

In the end we got lucky and nothing else happened to make the complicated situation an honest disaster.  Had Beth's situation turned into a rescue, I would have been too far away to assist and with Aaron already having problems, getting back to her would have been challenging.

Until we had a need to get to shore quickly, the outing was great.  Yaquina Bay is a great place to paddle and is a great family outing.  Just be aware that depending on where you go in the bay there can be extensive mud flats during very low tides which makes it impossible to give the little ones escape time.  Although the clamming would have been great.

Reel Paddling Film Festival 2011

Lined up outside the Bagdad for the film festival.

The Reel Paddling Film Festival made it's annual visit Portland this week thanks to Alder Creek Kayak and Willamette Riverkeeper.  As usual it was held at the McMenamins Bagdad Theater & Pub.   The Bagdad is a great place for events like this as you get your pizza and beer while enjoying a movie in a comfortable atmosphere.  Tim (my ride for this outing) and I were able to navigate traffic and cross town in 45 minutes to arrive right at 6pm for the doors to open.

Being a paddling film festival, you get a very focused audience. It was like having a super sized kayak club meeting.  Through the various outings and classes I've had, I probably knew more people in the theater that evening than I know at work.  This year there was a kayak which was raffled off at the end and a special twist on the last film of the evening.  We got to choose the last film of the evening.  Either the best sea kayaking or the best canoeing film of the 2011 film festival.  With a whole theater full of paddlers, most of whom are sea kayakers, I knew what our last film was going to be.

Beer, pizza, and movies.

This years selection of movies were all very good for their own reasons.   The festival opened up with Halo Effect by Steve Fisher.  I like watching white water films, but I find that too many of them are a series of waterfall drops which lasts for 60 minutes.  Through good cinematography and a compelling narrative, Halo Effect had much better staying power than your average white water kayaking film.




Our second film for the evening was Tanker Love.  This film follows a group of Hawaiian Life Guards visiting Galveston Texas in an effort to raise peoples awareness of the destruction that still exists from Hurricane Ike.  Oh, and while they are in Galveston they use standup paddle boards to surf tanker wakes that would run for 5 miles.




While I can not say that I liked our third movie the best, it is the one which I have thought the most about.  Solo is a documentary about the attempted trip from Australia to New Zealand by Andrew McAuley in 2007.  He was an IT professional, with a wife and young son, who quit his job to attempt a kayaking journey which most people considered impossible.  Aspects of this story hit very close to me and I imagine many others in the audience.  Previously, at the end of each film we all clapped to show our appreciation of the effort and quality of the production.  The somber mood of the film hit everyone so deeply that nearly all of us forgot to applaud.  After the credits had finished rolling and the film festival logo was showing on the screen, one person from the back of the theater began to clap.  By the third clap we all were jolted out of our personal reflections and gave the same appreciation applause we gave for the other films.  A man sitting off to my right said, "It's hard to clap for that one".  It's a very good film which is hard to like.








After Solo, the next two short films greatly lightened the mood.  Season: Fall and Small Hydro Power.








And finally we came to the last movie of the evening.  Was it going to be a canoe or sea kayaking movie.  I just knew that it was going to be the sea kayaking flick, until the details of the films were announced.  The best canoe film of 2011 was made by Frank Wolf.  His previous film, Borealis, was the most entertaining movie of the evening at the previous festival.  Suddenly I'm thinking that we might be in danger of watching the wrong movie.  I would guess that we were at least 80% sea kayakers with myself included.  Whichever film got the most applause was the one we were going to watch.  First up was the sea kayaking film.  The applause was good and I was wondering if the canoe film had a chance (along with probably everyone else who wanted it).   The voting for the canoe film came next and I clapped hard enough to make my hands numb.  So did everyone else who wanted it.  We soundly suppressed the sea kayak vote and got to watch Mammalian by Frank Wolf.   It was a very entertaining trip through the interior of Canada starting at Yellowknife and traveling to Rankin Inlet.  A number of mammals are encounted in the journey including the very rare snow leopard.






The final event of the evening was to raffle off the kayak.  Unlike most raffles for something this nice I was not up against thousands of other people.  It was my three tickets up against the tickets held by my fellow paddlers in the same great hall.  After a few moments of tension we all found out that the holder of ticket 662 had just won a kayak with paddle, life jacket, and car transport system.  A cheer from the upper deck let us all know where the winner was.  In that moment I discovered a reason to make sure that I attend this film festival again next year.  Maybe I'll be the person holding 662 next time.

Family Kayaking the Nestucca Bay

Over the summer the family and I went on a week long vacation to the Oregon coast.  One of the major highlights was the time we spent kayaking in the Nestucca bay. 

Our setup

The average temperature of the water off the coast of Oregon is in the low to mid 50’s F.   Everyone was dressed for immersion.  Beth got to try out the NRS Venus wetsuit I had given her a couple months before for her birthday.  She was very impressed with how well it fit her and the difference it made from her previous experiences being out in water.  Patrick and I were dressed in our NRS Farmer John wet suits, while Aaron was sporting a second hand 1mm suit.  Although his was by far the thinnest wet suit,  Aaron seemed to enjoy the cold water as he rushed into it while we were setting up and taking breaks. 

For our boats Beth paddled an Ocean Kayaks Peekaboo while I had a Necky Looksha T.  The Peekaboo has a jump seat in the front with is perfect for Aaron (3yrs old) to hang out.  Patrick sat in the front of the tandem with me.  Due to our weight difference it looked like I was doing a wheelie in the kayak most of the time.  Loading more weight in the front with Patrick would have evened out the boat, but for these easy day trips in perfect conditions it was not a big deal.

The outing

The Nestucca Bay is a nice sheltered body of water just south of Pacific City and bordered on the west by Bob Straub State Park.  We put into the bay on the north side of Bob Straub where they have a parking lot.  In the south east corner of the parking lot is a foot path that leads down to the waters edge.  We carried our boats down to the water, loaded up, and set out south towards the mouth of the bay.  We started out just before the flood tide.  Patrick alternated between helping with paddling and dragging his paddle in the water.  Thank goodness for rudders.  Aaron kept a lookout on the bow of Beth’s kayak while dragging his hands in the water.  He loved watching the water peel away from the boat as it was propelled forward by Beth’s strokes.

View Larger Map

As we floated over the shallow mud flats we were greeted by thousands of little nickel sized holes in the water bottom.  There were clams every which direction we looked.  Both Beth and I lamented the fact that neither of us had a shell fish harvesting license with us.  Beth’s kayak gave her an excellent view in the shallow water as she has a window in the bottom of her kayak.  Patrick was impressed that every one of these holes was the home of a clam living in the bay.   As we traveled around the bay we also encountered harbor seals, bald eagles, various minnows in the shallows, and numerous water birds.

Near the mouth of the bay we all pulled up on a beach which is part of Bob Straub State Park for a chance to stretch the legs and have lunch.  We had been engaged in a bit of a water fight up to this point.  No longer bound by the boats all squriters came out blazing.  We were on a warm sunny beach and alone to explore as far as we wanted.  Our battle and lunch were finished in time to catch the peak of the flood tide for a ride back.

Beth had never experienced the joy of a well timed tide.  We paddled out from the shallow water into the deeper channel where the river of water was rushing back in from the ocean.  She was impressed by how fast we were traveling back into the bay with little to no effort on our part.  We were easily going as fast as or faster than when we were paddling out.  Our kayak fleet arrived back to our starting destination without incident.  The best part of the outing is that everyone wanted to know when we were going to do it again.