I’ve thought about learning to kayak for several years now. It’s one of the things that you can’t really half-ass however and I never really found myself in a position to learn. It was also easy to stick to my drift boat or raft where I could load up the dog and do some fishing with a cooler full of beer.
I found myself on a ducky in Ecuador amidst a group of experienced kayakers however and watching them glide through rapids and control their boats was inspiring. The perspective and field of vision is much lower than a raft and the currents are grabby and require exceptional control. I like that aspect of the sport, you are completely connected to the water and can’t rely on big tubes of air to drift over the intricacies of eddies seams, boils, holes and changes in the current.
After that ducky run in Ecuador, I continued my drive south and landed in Futaleufu after a month of straight fishing in Argentina. The town is filled with may of the world’s best kayakers so I signed up for a lesson with Patagonia Outdoors. My instructor was new to the area, a young man named Manu from New Zealand. He was clearly an experienced boater and was patient in the lake as I rolled repeatedly and required rescues on every try.
Learning a new sport in my mid-thirties requires a certain level of humility. I can think back to being my instructors age and I was going head to head with some of the best wrestlers in the country for several hours everyday. Many of those guys moved on to win major MMA titles and are some of the best fighters in the world. I was young, practically born into the sport and the technical aspects of the sport were second nature after years of developing muscle memory. I can see that in the young kayakers as they roll and flip their way across class V rapids and punishing whitewater in the Futaleufu river.
On day one of my journey however, we stuck to the lake for a few hours and followed with a short float through class II waters on the Rio Espolon where leaned wrong into my first eddy and rather than carving a nice line, found myself upside-down and ejected into a swim for the shoreline. In short, I was awkward and a general shit show, frustrated by waters I can easily read in a raft but am completely uncomfortable running in a kayak. That discomfort is welcome though. It means I have a long way to go, and something new to learn that will keep me close to the water when I’m not fishing or rowing my normal rigs. It was a nice welcome to the world of paddling and I’m ready for more.
