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Paddle Bob

Paddling Sinking Creek at sunrise

concord_sunrise.jpg

I woke up early today and drove down to Concord Cove Park since I still had my kayak on the truck from the Fontana paddles earlier this week. Concord Cove is about a 12 mile roundtrip paddle from the house, which pretty much is as far as I can go in one push, so putting in there gave me the ability to start exploring some new stretches of Loudon.

But instead of heading out onto Loudon I paddled past the Concord Yacht Club and into Sinking Creek. I spent a few hours exploring there, cruising past the Concord and Fox Road marinas and up into the farthest reaches of the creek. At one point, I had to wait for a river otter to swim under the Emory Church Road Bridge before I could enter, ducking my head to avoid scraping it as I paddled through. The area up past the bridge is awesome. Very remote feel despite how much it’s in the middle of everything. In addition to the otter, the highlight of the trip was watching an osprey chase off a Canada goose. Not sure what the goose did to earn the Osprey’s wrath, but it was pretty fun to watch.

Total paddle was almost 12 miles roundtrip. More photos. I’m thinking I’ll leave the kayak up in the garage for a while to encourage me to explore more sections of Loudon and its associated tributaries …

concord_paddle_07_16_10

Categories
Paddle Bob

February kayaking


February kayaking

Originally uploaded by Suffering the Benz

I took advantage of a 70-degree February day on Tuesday to paddle the kayak. As is generally the case, I was overly ambitious.

I paddled upstream on Lake Loudon with the goal of reaching the cove at Concord Park on Northshore. I made it, but as I started turning south into the cove the wind picked up and got pretty ugly, prompting me to turn back. The paddle home was a slog as I paddled into headwinds, but I made it with time to spare before sunset.

It was almost 12 miles roundtrip and it took about 2.5 hours. It left me pretty sore on Wednesday …

Categories
Paddle Bob

Navigating a handheld GPS

loudon_paddle_12_29_2008

Holiday eating and drinking had me antsy to get out on the water and paddle, so I decided to oblige the urge today and take advantage of the opportunity to play with the handheld GPS Lara bought me for Christmas.

The weather was perfect — upper 50s, clear skies — but I stayed close to the shoreline anyway just in case I got dumped from my kayak. Water temperature was 47 degrees. Aside from gulls, herons and the occasional kingfisher, I was the only thing on the lake. It was good to plow through that open space after paddling the claustrophobic streams of Central Florida last week. I turned on the GPS, which recorded my 6.6 mile paddle. But I couldn’t figure out how to move the file to my computer in a format it would understand.

I’m using a Lowrance iFinder H20c, so I saved the MMC file to an SD card and moved the .usr file to my computer. Then I found GPS Babel, which coverted the Lowrance file to a Google Earth .kml file. From there it was simple to download Google Earth, view the route I took and then save it as a .jpg.

My favorite part of the file is you can see where I lingered at the entrance to Duck Cove on my way back to watch the sunset and snap this photo.