My first kayaking trip of the year
On Monday two weeks ago, I went out on my first kayaking trip of the season. After a period of working a lot and not having many days of it was absolutely fantastic to finally have a day all to myself and to get out on the water. For the first trip of the year, I couldn’t have asked for better conditions. The skies were clear and the temperature nice. There was a little bit of a draft in the air, but the water was practically flat. Closer to perfect is hard to come by.
There is something special about kayaking. The feeling of being all alone on a tiny “boat” with all of the ocean in front of you is quite serene. You move (relatively) silently through the water and can fit in to all the narrow and shallow areas around islands and islets that you can’t get to with a boat. And because you make little to no sound you can also get much closer to birds and other animals, which means you can sometimes get right up next to them without them noticing or really caring. This last part however might sometimes backfire. Especially at this time of year and especially around terns, as their comfort zone is substantially larger than most other seabirds I have met, and they are therefore usually not impressed with your near silent gliding past their islet and might try to scare you away from where they apparently have a nest by swooping down towards your head. Even if you did not see them before they started to kaw loudly and try to swipe your hat of your head. But more on this later.
I decided to start by going around Kalvøya and just see how far I wanted to go. On the ocean side of Kalvøya there are several smaller islands and many cosy nooks and narrow passes you can go through. Since the weather was so nice, I decided to paddle out and around some of the islands to get a bit out of my usual route. After a bit of exploring, I decided to cross directly over from Lille Øygholmen to Grønningen where I rediscovered a small bay that I have been to many times as a kid but had forgotten about. On my way there I overtook a sailboat that was actually sailing. That probably says more about the wind conditions than how fast I was going, but it felt cool either way.
I continued following along Ågerøya eastwards. As I turned the corner of the last islet before the next stretch of open water, I suddenly realised I had made a mistake. Remember the terns I wrote about earlier? This particular islet turned out to be inhabited by a couple of the aforementioned terns, and they were not happy about me intruding on their personal space. When this happens there is really only one thing to do. You put the pedal to the metal, or in this case oar to the water, and get to a distance deemed safe by the tern, not you, as quickly as possible. When I got far enough away the terns stopped diving for my head and flew back to their islet. After the interesting encounter with the terns, I crossed over to Store Mannholmen and continued between Gaupholmen and Risholmen and on to Brekkestø where I got on land to eat some lunch.
In Brekkestø they have a small grocery store, a fuel pump, toilets and an ice-cream kiosk that sells what is probably Norway’s largest ice-cream cones. If you want to you can also take a little walk to a viewpoint on the nearby hill, but I did not do that this time as wetsuit socks aren’t the most well suited kind of footwear for walking.
After lunch I got back in the kayak and started heading back. I didn’t want to go back the same way I came from, so I continued down Kravigfjorden and through Krosssund to Blindleia. At this point the wind had picked up a little. Through Krossund however it was completely calm as this pass lays at an angel that meant there was an island in the way of the wind, but when I got to Blindleia the wind was blowing head on the entire way back. I expected it to be a tough trip back to the cabin, but apparently all the climbing I have been doing for the past year has payed of in the form of better arm muscle endurance and the trip back went smoothly. I didn’t even have to stop to take a break, so I can honestly say I was quite pleased with myself and concluded that this first trip of the season had been a raging success. Here’s to many more 😊
