Kayaking on The Estero River

I’ve started kayaking on the weekends, when I have time, to get a nice workout and to also relax on the water. Thus far, the times I’ve gone out have been pleasant. The people who run Estero Outfitters , where I rent my kayaks, are cool. Out on the water, everyone speaks to you with a smile. Those smiles tend to turn to laughter when someone who’s had one too many, runs their kayak up into the mangroves as they did today. That crap was funny. Anyway…

My neighbor and I hit the water about 1pm. He was in a eight footer and I was in an eleven footer. They are wide kayaks but very stable. The only drawback is they are slower. We made a plan to get to the mouth of the river and back in 3 hours. A distance that’s roughly 6 miles out. It sounded good until we realized that we were going to be rowing into the wind with the tide coming in. This pretty much sucked when either of us needed to take a drink of water because we’d stop rowing and literally come to a dead stop then start drifting backwards. This was the story the whole way out.

There were more boats out on the water today as well. About 3 miles into the trip, we come to a bend in the river that Jay and I refer to as “Dead Man’s Curve”. It was here where some guy comes around the blind turn reenacting Tokyo Drift in a fishing boat. We heard the boat but could not tell the direction it was coming from until it was almost too late. I looked back just to see the the boat hit the corner. The front of the boat was in the air which means this guy had the outboards open up all the way. I’m surprised he even saw us because from where we were, we could only see the underside of the boat. He killed the engine and slammed back into the water about 40 yards from where we were. The boat coasted by us still creating a wake that would have flipped us had we been in the narrower, less stable kayaks. As he passed us, Jay and I laughed about what almost happened and about how I would not like telling his wife why his hat is the only thing that made it back from the trip.

The fear of being hit by a boat had quickly come and gone and left us with a false since of security. Yeah, more boats. For the remainder of the trip we dodged 3 pontoons, and 2 other fishing boats. We didn’t make it out to the mouth of the river like we had planned because we were short on time but we did make it out roughly 4 miles. The trip back to the dock was not bad at all. We saw a manatee, had the wind at our backs and the tide was still coming in which meant we could stop rowing and drift a bit.

We’ll try again next week.