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"Wow..." Our raised eyebrows said it all. To our great surprise, after digging out our old 2005 arctic expedition home-made aluminium wheeled kayaks from under the house and putting them in the water at Pittwater last week - not only did they float, but they barely even leaked! This bodes well for our upcoming 111km kayak marathon down the Hawkesbury River...
After leaning heavily on them one at a time to coax water to trickle in through any holes, around which we drew with permanent marker to direct some sikaflex later on, we both paddled out from Careel Bay, out to my folks yacht Starship, and then over to Portuguese Beach, an epic journey of 2 km of very not-particularly-open water, which Jess .. erm.. I was going to say 'tagged along' in my sea kayak, but she was moving about twice the speed of our PACs, and in all fairness was actually leading Clark and I slowly across to the beach...
The very flat bottom and no rudder of our PACs makes them skate around all over the surface and keeping a straight course is a bit of a challenge (old memories came flooding back), and pretty soon we both had cuts on the same parts of our hands as we did in 2005, where each paddle stroke our fingers would sometimes snag against the inconveninelt y placed handles on the side of our PACs... Good times.
We timed our trip, and a quick calculation revealed that it'd likely take us about 26hrs, not including breaks, to paddle the 111km that usually takes people somewhere more like 10-14hrs... Interesting....
But, as weight isn't an issue in our PACs, in fact more weight the better in some ways as it reduces the excessive windage, we are going to deck out our PACs with Christmas lights etc and live it up down the river...
Looking forward to it..
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