Kayak Day

sharkskin

Here are some pics from our recent kayaking day. First up, River, these are my Sharkskin socks. They are specially designed for water sports. Chill proof, sun proof, windproof, neoprene outside, fleece inside. They are the best things ever!

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The view out into Jervis Bay. Just out of the shot, a tourist packed dolphin boat about to leave the wharf. We parked up and watched it. :)

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Looking down Currumbene Creek towards Huskisson.

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Looking back towards Myola.

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As we were heading back to the wharf, the sun came out. I was kinda glad it waited because with so little wind, it got pretty warm out there.

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Reminder to myself – when you do 10km on the kayak and it has been a while since you got on there, the sides of your feet where they rest on the pedal might puff up like you were stung by a bee or bitten by something. Just for fun, maybe one side will puff up first, and the other side might take a couple of hours to puff up, just to freak you out.

Overall it was an awesome day out. Kinda wish we’d headed out into Jervis Bay, but it can go from glass to whitecaps in a fairly quick time out there.. :) The creek is super protected – this is why all the boats are moored in there.

exercise, kayak

My New Kayak Friend

stakeout
An underwater photo of our stake out stick

After a lot of kayaking over the past year we finally made the decision to buy a second, slightly smaller single person kayak. Why? There’s three main reasons –

1. So I can take it out on my own when the Other Half is at work.

2. So we have an extra seat (or two extra seats if the other half is working) for visitors.

3. So that we have space for fish, if and when we catch any.

We got it over the weekend and it is the cutest, sportiest, fastest little kayak – the Hobie Mirage Sport.

I took it out on my own today for the first time. The weather was absolutely awful, windy, rainy, wavy, even tending towards a bit scary. However I’ve got to the point now where I feel confident in most situations and our part of the bay was fairly sheltered..

I was out for an hour and a half, and it was awesome. :) The plan is to work my way up to being out on the kayak every day over the summer, the latter half of the summer especially.

I have been training for the above for over a month now – 30 minutes of exercise each day plus 2 one hour aqua aerobics sessions per week. I have put on about 3kg of solid muscle yet losing inches in other places. ;)

So that is just a little update on what is going on in Snoskred’s world of kayaking. ;)

clouds

exercise, kayak

Snoskred Gets Banned!

One of the very first kayaking blogs that I stumbled upon quite by accident back in the days that I did not know kayaking blogs existed was Yakabout.

I have learnt a lot from reading this blog, and many of the things I have learned have changed our experience of kayaking forever for us. For example the shark skins – had we not heard about them on Yakabout earlier this year, we would have put the kayak away during the winter months like we did the year before. Thanks to Yakabout writing about them we got the shark skins and kayaked ourselves silly during the winter months.

At some point during the last few months with us making the decision to get into fishing from the kayak, I wanted to learn more about the fishing aspect of things. So I looked around the web with Yakabout’s links page as a starting point, and I found a kayak forum called AKFF – the Australian Kayak Fishing Forum. I lurked for a bit, getting a feel for the water, and then I signed up and began posting.

I won’t lie and say that I felt comfortable right off the bat there – there was a lot of discussion between people who clearly knew each other personally. There was also a fair bit of “Aussie” humour, some of it funny, some of it not funny at all. That is usually the case with Aussie humour, I tend to find. You take the good with the bad, though.

Earlier this week a big argument broke out when one of the members posted a photo of their dog in a thread asking members to sign a petition. Their dog happens to be a Dingo. It is legal to keep them in NSW providing you follow very specific rules, which the person in question was doing. Frankly I wish every dog breed had rules and you needed a permit to keep them, having been bitten twice by dogs I hate it when people just let their dogs run loose in the streets. It happens a lot where I live.

It seems on this forum when people have an argument, nobody reports the posts, the mod team don’t bother to step in even when they can see that rules are being broken and personal attacks are being made, and then when asked why action was not taken, they state that nobody reported the posts.

Once the argument is over – or even while it is ongoing, members of the forum will jump into the thread posting completely off topic and somewhat stupid things to try and break the tension and calm things down (hello, that is what happens when the mod/admin team isn’t doing their job properly!)

So when I saw a totally offensive (to me at least) image of a dead cat on a road posted in that thread with a sign saying “Free Cat” pointing at the run over animal, I reported the post.

I can’t remember exactly what I said when I reported it, maybe just something like inappropriate image. If I was shocked by the image, I was completely flabbergasted by the response I got from a moderator on the site named Leftieant.

As I have now been banned from the site, I am unable to post a copy of it, however I remember him saying that the image had been sent by email a lot, and he believed it wasn’t inappropriate or offensive.

I responded saying I had never seen it before, I was offended by it, and that I knew there were quite a few members on the site who were under 18, and that I hated to think of kids stumbling onto that image as a surprise to them. I also quoted sections from the rules that the image specifically broke.

I did not receive a response to that private message, and no action was taken about the photo. It is still there as far as I know. It was about this time that I began feeling this site might not be a great place to hang out.. what happened next certainly proved those feelings to be correct.

On Sunday afternoon, I visited the AKFF forums only to find a couple of threads with ……… in the title, one of which was soon deleted. I then discovered that the signature of one of the forum members – Astro, who is a contributor at Yakabout – seemed to have been modified and now made no sense.

It now said – Kayak Fishing Correspondent http://……….com.au – and I knew that it should have said Yakabout where the dots were. Hmm.. I dropped over to Yakabout where people were already chatting about this bizarre phenomenon in the shoutbox.

That same day, Yakabout had launched a set of forums on their site. Jealous much, AKFF guys? There was no reason to be – there is plenty of room on the internet for everyone to have their own forums. However with Yakabout being as well known and as popular as it was, they clearly felt threatened by it.

I wasn’t about to keep my mouth shut about this. I felt that any community that would act so childishly towards someone as awesome as Josh from Yakabout was probably not a place I was going to spend a lot of time in the future, so I was happy to be quite outspoken about it and you can clearly see that I was in this thread which I am surprised still exists – read it while you can!.

However I did not break the rules – being an Administrator on other forums, I know better than to do that.

Josh from Yakabout also posted about the goings on, which you can read here – Days Of Our Lives.

Imagine my surprise when I returned home from a kayaking trip on Monday only to find that my forum account on AKFF no longer existed. I am in excellent company though, because Yakass (Josh) no longer exists either. No explanation from the people on AKFF, no discussion, no mention of a warning, nothing. They just threw away two members of the community.

I am assuming (perhaps someone from the site reading this could comment and let me know for sure) that they made the decision to ban Josh, and they felt I would not keep quiet about that either, so they banned me at the same time.

Now me, I can understand. I am nobody in the kayak fishing world. But Josh? Who is probably one of the most well known (not to mention popular) kayak fishermen in Australia these days? That’s a bad choice, guys. That one will come back to bite you once your members work out what is going on. Oh wait.. you’re not ballsy enough to explain it to them, and they’re gonna have to figure it out all on their own?

Let me give you an example of how you are supposed to administrate a forum. When you ban someone and create a new rule as a result of that, you need to let people in on the secret.

Recently a member on The Mudflats borrowed money from other members promising to pay it back – and then did not pay it back. When we Admins found out about this, we chose to ban the member and we also created some new rules as a result. Here you can see the post where we explained the banning, and here you can see the new rules.

That’s how you do it, AKFF people. So why don’t you explain the banning of Yakass and Snoskred to your members? Oh wait.. you don’t have a good reason for doing it? Ohhh.. right.

There were some people on AKFF who I looked forward to meeting – I guess that won’t be possible now. That is the one thing I do regret about all of this.

Not one to let things like this upset me, I have built the bridge and got over it – and joined a new kayak forum which Josh assures me is awesome, and a quick look around over there shows me it probably is the better place for me anyway, they have a local fishing group. And I see some of the people I had hoped to meet are members of this new forum also too.

internet, kayak, people talking about you

Rainy Long Weekend

Had this long weekend been sunny, the local waterway would probably have been filled with idiots who have no clue about whatever watersport they are taking part in.. Jetsking, boating, waterskiing, canoeing, kayaking, launching their boats without a clue of how to do it, a multitude of nitwits looking for their very own Darwin award..
pdl1
However, it was rainy, cloudy, and generally shyte weather. With the shark skin this does not bother us – as long as it isn’t too wavy we’re going. There was only one other boat out on the water and it was a very long way from us. Awesome!
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Can you see the boat in this photo above? We could only barely see it, and only occasionally hear it.
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These birds seen above were hanging out happily on the end of someones private jetty. As soon as we got near to them, they took off. I do not know why birds find our kayak so scary! :) Swans panic, ducks take flight, even pelicans seem to find it terrifying.
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It was a great day out, and we were glad we went – and super glad the weather was shyte. Not just because of a lack of people on the water but because our area truly needed the rain. We’ve had quite a dumping of water from the sky over the last week or so and it is much appreciated by the gardens. Things were beginning to look a bit brown around here which was quite scary with the bushfire season approaching.

Aussie Culture, kayak

Sometimes You Gotta Go

I started writing this post a couple of weeks ago – finally have the time to finish it!
For the last month, every single day off that the other half had has been gorgeous blue skies, but evil winds which made kayaking a bit scary – making big waves on our little waterway. We were suffering from serious kayak withdrawal.
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So despite the fact that most of the day was already gone, it was somewhat windy, and clouds were on the way.. it was time to just do it.
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As we paddled out we found the two black swans who have been rearing a couple of swan babies not too far from our backyard. We saw them the last time we went kayaking – they have grown a lot since then!
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The parents were squawking up a storm, and the little swans were paddling as fast as their little legs would paddle. Seems they find the kayak a little scary. :)
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One thing I find about kayaking when the sun is not out – you can’t see into the water. It makes it difficult to know the depth of the water and when you’re in a new spot where you don’t really know the terrain you want to try and keep away from the “edges” so to speak. Which is a shame because I would have liked to get a bit closer to have a look at this spot. It is a reserve, so we’re going to head back for a walk around there.
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As we headed back home, the sun got lower in the sky creating some awesome reflections on the water.
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When we got back, we found out we were pretty wet from kayaking out into the waves. I know it doesn’t look wavy but it never does in the photos. When we went out today I took some video footage so people will believe me about the waves – maybe this will get posted here in the future.

The great thing about the shark skin for me is that I do not feel the wet or the cold – until I stand up. Then all the water which has collected around my butt runs down the inside of my shark skin towards my toes.

This happens with the bungs in or out, I can’t seem to win – if we leave them out it won’t be wavy and they don’t need to be out so I could have gone without wet butt – if we leave them in the waves will crash over the bow and leave a puddle of water which creates extra wet butt!

I can’t imagine life without the shark skin now. I love them. I can imagine so many uses for them besides kayaking – the windproof aspect of them is the most awesome. I can be warmer being splashed by waves out on the kayak with a big wind blowing right at me than I am sitting here in the house with a rug on. Sounds unbelievable but it is true. :)
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kayak, photo blog country NSW, photography, photos

The Awesomeness Is Overwhelming

So, I mentioned a while back that our new place had something awesome about it. We’re almost all moved in now, and today we took a little time off to enjoy the awesomeness. What is it?

one

It backs onto a gorgeous body of water, and we have our own private boat ramp. How awesome is that?

So this morning instead of putting the kayak on the car and driving it 10kms or so, we pulled it out of the garage and walked a very short distance. We were not out for too long, but long enough to absorb the awesomeness before heading off to the old house to pack up the last stuff.

This week I will get stuck into cleaning the old place before we hand the keys back, and then we can relax, and unpack. :)

We are planning a summer of kayaking, exploring the local waterways, and having way too much fun. Yay!

kayak, Moving House

Kayaking Around Australia

No, I’m not brave enough to try it myself – but Freya Hoffmeister is currently kayaking around Australia. I have been following her blog – you should too! You can find it here – Freya’s Blog. Right now, she has not seen land in almost a week – she is crossing the Gulf of Carpenteria. She will hopefully see land again this Friday.

Only one other person has successfully kayaked around Australia. It will take approximately a year. I have to say I admire Freya greatly – I cannot imagine the courage and strength it takes to do something like this.. I find it hard to get organised for one four hour trip out on the local creek, I cannot imagine planning ahead for spending over a week on the water – sleeping on it too! ;)

I think our kayak might be ready to take the winter rest, sadly. It has been so cold here the last few days – it is snowing in the Australian alps again.. at night time it is getting down to less than 5 degrees! If the sun comes out again, we will go out for a final trip.

Australia, kayak

They Travel In Packs

All the times we have been kayaking, and the other day out was the first time we saw these guys.
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Beautiful little blue crabs with orange legs. They seem to travel in packs. When we pedal by, they run away.
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In other news, some sick twisted person decided to play a Sopranos marathon over the weekend. Easter weekend! Shouldn’t that be illegal or something?
Regardless, I was glued to the teevee. ;) Still am actually, there’s like 50 eps I recorded on the Mystar. Plus they had Dexter season 3 on all day today. It’s not exactly “wholesome” teevee, but I have to be honest, I like it that way.

animals, kayak

Free Range Chicken

As you continue up the river we call our comfort zone, you begin to see tall gum trees instead of mangroves. Occasionally, there is a house – well you would call them more of a run down shack, but people do live in them.
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As we kayaked up the river recently, I said to the other half “Can you hear a chicken?” and he agreed that he could hear one. We thought it must have been in a chicken house near the run down shack, but we soon discovered this is a free range chicken.
chooken
Maybe it is a rooster, but I don’t know much about chickens really. It wasn’t a course available in school. The chicken certainly seemed to be enjoying the beach, scratching in the sand.

Chickens, kayak