For fifteen years I got to live a dream of being on the water where I could slide a kayak in the water and go fishing. We also had a skiff on a lift, but piloting a skiff is work compared to paddling a kayak. There is little that compares to being on the water when the water is near perfect. Every stroke is magical. When winds, tides, and river current cooperate, you are in a zone that few people get to sample much enjoy many times.
Once you have tasted a perfect morning or afternoon on the river, you keep going back trying to grab another piece of perfection. The experience hooks you. It is the river seducing you.
For me it was just the pure relaxation that comes from floating around between the oyster rocks on a blue sky day when the wind and tide conspires to make life easy on the river. Though I often used the word paradise to describe the Crystal Coast, no one should be lulled into thinking that all days are like the one in the picture. There were a lot of days when you get back to the dock almost sore from fighting the river and tides.
Sometimes those perfect days are pretty hard to find even for those of us living here. I was one of the lucky few who could take an hour or two to go kayaking if things are not too busy at work. Making up some work later in the evening might have been required, but that was a small price to pay if you hit one of those wonderful days on the White Oak River. Some days I would even catch a flounder, drum or trout and bring it home for lunch.
My kayak was rarely more than ten feet from the water and I just launched from our backyard. Depending on the wind and tide, I could paddle to the middle of the river in ten to fifteen minutes so there wasno putting my kayak on a car and driving thirty minutes to get to water. We kayaked nine to ten months out of the year depending on the water temperature.
The biggest enemy of kayaking on the coast in a big coastal river is wind. The more experience you have kayaking, the more wind you can handle assuming you have a kayak that can also handle it. In my fifteen years there, I kayaked exclusively in a small area of the White Oak River. I rarely went very much north of our inlet, Raymond's Gut, and I never kayaked south of Jones Island, the island at the bottom of the map. I knew my part of the river very well, but even I could get beat up the wind and tide.
A Wednesday in July 2014 , I had a few hours off and there was hardly any wind in our inlet. I learned early that the lack of wind back at our house in the marsh meant nothing when it came to wind on the river. I also figured out the best way to understand what was happening on the river was to paddle out there and check it out.
I had a couple of close fishing spots that I could usually wet a line even in windy conditions. I headed out that day and I figured out before I very far into the river that it was a lot windier than it appeared from home. Even with all the wind and waves, I was determined to fish a little. Three or four casts were all that I needed to decide that I needed to change location and work my way back into Raymond's Gut, fishing the marsh edges as I went.
I did that and fished for twenty to thirty minutes with no fish and headed back to my dock less than five minutes away. The next day during my morning walk around our boardwalk in the neighborhood, I took a couple of telephoto shots and the river appeared a bit quieter on Thursday morning.
That evening my kayak went in the water and I headed out on another journey. From the attached map you can see my trip after I got in the river and turned on my GPS recorder. While it was by no means an easy paddle, it was beautiful out on the water and I was determined to get to my rocks and fish. I got there made one cast and the skies opened up. I was one wet person by the time that I got back to the dock. Once I got inside, I stopped to take a picture. Instantly I realized that I had answered a question no one wants to answer, "How do you give a kayak a bath." The answer of course is “go fishing in the rain.”
I used a cloth to wring out a couple of inches of water inside the kayak. It is good that I had a short memory. I was back on the river chasing fish that next weekend. Often it took two or three times to hit one of those perfect days on the White Oak. It was worth it because the river is truly magical when you find that perfect combination of water, calm winds, blue skies and a slack tide.
That happened to be the only time I got wet while kayaking during our fifteen years on the coast. If I look back, it is was also the first time I have ever been wet from rain while kayaking in over twenty-three years. I wish I had been as lucky with wind as rain. I also caught enough fish over the years to declare that I had just enough luck in fishing to keep me happy.
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