Kayaking Freaks

From the Nose of Our Kayak Don & Janet Beasley Chapter 7: Another New Kayak? The anxious parents If you remember from our last chapter, we warned you about the sport of kayaking being addicting, and justifying all of the new kayaks you will add to your collection over time. As you will see, our new-old kayak told us what we wanted to know...YES!...we loved the harder plastic and rudder, so it was time to upgrade to a brand new Wilderness Systems T145! After much research we marveled at how the pictures showed us that the seats alone were worth the price...fully adjustable, softer, and the back of my seat would not fold over backwards when I leaned back. We loved the bright orange color so other boats could easily spot us on the water. There was only one teensy tiny set back... Our brand new Wilderness Systems T145 ...we lived in Florida and had to have it shipped to Michigan to greet us the summer of 2010 when we arrived at our (used to be) summer home on Waishkey Bay ...

From the Nose of Our Kayak Don & Janet Beasley Chapter 6: Out with the Old and In with the Older! View on Silver River From the Nose of Our (new-old) Kayak One thing we'd like to mention to those of you who are new to the sport of kayaking...beware, kayaking  is  addicting and you'll find yourself justifying the numerous kayaks you will come to own over time.  After a year of fun and minimal discovery we decided it was time to move up. We wanted to get away from the softer plastic and move up into a hard plastic body for the kayak. We searched and searched, and finally found the one at the price we wanted to pay. Being it was our first step up, we didn't want to drop a lot of money into it just to try it out.  Our first hard plastic bodied kayak was a Wilderness Systems (tandem) 145T. This particular kayak was new to us, but much older, and shall we say much more "experienced," than our brand new one in which we had started. The seats in t...

From the Nose of Our Kayak Don & Janet Beasley Chapter 5 Returning to Michigan's U.P. The time had come to return to Michigan's U.P. We decided we wanted to try a longer jaunt this trip, so we chose the Tahquamenon River, starting at the mouth off of the highly respected Lake Superior.  Kayaking Michigan's U.P. holds its own challenges: weather, cold water temps that average a whopping 52 degrees Fahrenheit in the dead of summer, big wildlife, and some of the most extreme "middle of nowhere" feelings to be had on the water. Kayaking the big, open water of Lake Superior calls for a different kind of kayak, a  far different one than you see we are using in our photos here. It also calls for  a different set of advanced skills as a kayaker, and a much different set of equipment to be carried on board for starters.     Weather in the U.P. can change in the blink of an eye. Even on a river, and not the open water, if you're paddling with the breeze you ...