JOIN THE SHARING ECONOMY People are sharing everything these days: cars, tools, houses. Like these items, good kayaks are expensive, but durable and long lasting. Why own three boats that only get used for hours a week? I’ll bet one kayak could serve five or 10 people. We could store it by the water, share the lock combo, and set up online reservations. I’m thinking of starting a community library for out- door gear of all kinds, so I don’t have to own a nest egg’s worth of kayaks, canoes, surf skis and paddleboards for every conceivable mode of watery play. Want to join?
COVER YOUR COCKPIT Pricey real estate and high populations make homelessness a problem in our cities, notably among wildlife. Spiders and slugs are my customary cockpit stowaways. But twice, raccoons have turned one of my kayaks into a fetid winter den or part-time port- a-potty. And readers may remember an earlier reference in this column to a kayak bulkhead that was devoured—in the spring I found a gaping hatch full of pungent foam crumbs. These poor vermin are, like us paddlers, just wild creatures trying to eke out a living in a hostile urban jungle, but that does not make us allies. Shell out for a good cockpit cover.
CHECK THE WATER QUALITY
In the city, weather conditions are generally tamer, but along with the forecast I also check online water quality reports. After heavy rains, the E. coli count skyrockets. It’s okay to paddle, but wait a couple days before attempting rolls or rescues.
EMBRACE THE OFF-SEASON
Come fall, the circus leaves town, the beachgoers are replaced by migrating birds, parking lots empty, the bacterial counts drop and the algae blooms die off. Frigid temps wrap the busiest beaches in a cloak of peace, wildness and free parking. To love off-season paddling, all you need is a drysuit.
ADOPT A WATERY STATE OF MIND The key to overcoming the travails of urban paddling is to let your time on the water be a gateway to a new pattern of thought. For me, being surrounded by millions of other humans threat- ens to turn every petty annoyance into a personal battle: the guy who cut me off at the stoplight, the gentrifying hordes driving up house prices, the construction workers blocking the roads. It’s all somebody’s fault. Nature inverts this mentality; out there, it’s not about you or anybody else. All you can control is your attitude. And that’s calming.
One of my favorite places to paddle is a large peninsula that’s younger than I am—it’s constructed entirely of construction waste. As new glass condos overtake the ephemeral down- town, truckloads of rubble are dumped here for infinite repose, raising the lakebed to become parkland, a refuge for coyotes and waterfowl.
The bulldozed remains of so many expressways and buildings have a timeless, wild quality that belies their manmade origins. It used to make me angry that all I had to look at were the crumbled corpses of factories and warehouses. That the weathered drift- wood and fragrant kelp beds of my student days in the Pacific Northwest had been cruelly replaced by broken concrete tele- phone poles and mangled knots of rebar twisting out of the shal- lows like jagged reefs.
But paddling is paddling. It tires your muscles and opens your mind in the same way, no matter how urban. Whatever the head- aches of getting on the water and home again, you’re a better person for it.
Waterlines columnist Tim Shuff is a former editor at Adventure Kayak and embraces both the playful and serious sides of paddling.
www.adventurekayakmag.com | 37
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Salus-AK.indd 1 2015-01-28 12:14 Puffin Saco in the Arctic
PHOTO: RICK MATTHEWS
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