Down to the Sea in Kayaks

Julia paddled left, I pushed right and our double kayak jolted to a halt. We were impaled on a submerged log. Our boat was staying dry inside, but somehow I did not expect the same for our undershorts.

Roaring all around us was the Bebedero River, brimming with the runoff of several hundred square miles of western Costa Rica. These surging waters are home to poisonous snakes, and even if my wife and I survived the swim to the brush-entangled shore, we would have no specific idea where we were, except shivering in a Six Flags Over Scorpions theme park and unable to speak Spanish. My companion hissed, "I would rather sit here and starve than swim."

This was not sea kayaking at its finest. Typically, the sport consists of an inconspicuous poke along a marine wilderness, or an unobtrusive perusal of houseboats on an urban lake. Encounters with killer whales or topless sunbathers, as sporadic as they are sublime, are unusual in a conveyance that favors subtlety over confrontation.

But once in a while, even sea kayakers like a small adrenaline boost, though preferably not one provided by a shattered hull and deadly snakes.

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Sea kayaking is not white-water kayaking; it has nothing to do with dredging river bottoms with one's head. It is about staying upright and dry and carrying sufficient provisions that you may eat and drink like Louis XIV in obscure wildernesses that backpackers get to only after ten dinners of freeze-dried Nike.

In nearly (continued on page 164)Sea Kayaks(continued from page 104) 20 years of sea kayaking in Puget Sound, Canada, Alaska, Europe and Central America, in a two-seat collapsible kayak or a single-seat fiberglass expedition boat, I have never accidentally flipped my craft. This fact would make me seem ridiculous to the Tsunami Rangers, a group of endorphin rocketeers in California who like to bang their kayaks against the rock gardens in the Pacific Coast surf. Their wardrobe is from a football locker room and their boats are shuttlecraft from a Romulan war bird. They go upside down a lot.

Even among the less adrenaline-stoked sea kayakers there runs a wild hair which suggests that surviving a dump in a fully loaded boat is a mandatory credential for a serious practitioner. So rip my stripes off. I still have the same camera I started with, and the only gear I've lost was left behind when I ran from a small black bear that went streamside for a drink at the same moment I did.

Saving stuff is important, because bringing stuff is a big part of the pleasure of long-distance kayaking. With more than 20 cubic feet of storage in the larger expedition models, kayaks permit the import of library, kitchen and wine cellar into the wilderness.

Water is the kayaker's Sherpa. It bears almost any burden without complaint, needs no food and doesn't demand to be paid extra when something goes wrong. It doesn't care if you bring cast-iron frying pans, multiple stoves, three bottles of special-occasion pinot noir and the stack of novels that had been sitting unread on the nightstand.

All that water demands is respect. Go where it wants, assume nothing, don't fight its moods. Not constrained by weight, limited only modestly by bulk and unhindered by keel or gasoline engine, the kayaker is privy to places untrodden except by hooves, flippers and small, webbed feet. The shoreside trails kayakers find tend to have been created and used exclusively by mammals of formidable size and fur.

Once a group of friends and I were reveling in a particularly magnificent campsite along the Stikine River, which slashes through the Coast Mountains of British Columbia. We were interrupted by the disturbing rumble and thrash of a beast in the bush. Before I had time to reach for my bookmark, a moose braked to a halt at the corner of our clearing on the rocky beach. Blinking at us through the long northern twilight, he thought better of confrontation; he was absent his antlers, either because he had shed them for spring or because of clashes with rivals.

With glaciered mountains on one side and the roiling Stikine on the other, the moose galumphed across the beach and pitched into the river with a raucous splash. His churning legs were silent but relentless, and we could hear the rhythmic rasp of heavy breathing. Blasting through a strong current on a diagonal line across the three-quarter-mile-wide river, he reached the shallows of the far shoreline, then galloped into the woods, leaving an audio memory to resonate a few moments more above the river's murmur.

Campsite encounters with the locals are not unique to kayakers. What distinguishes the experience are waterborne meetings. Between the north end of Vancouver Island and the British Columbia coast is an island nature festival called Blackfish Sound, named for the big kids on the block, the orcas. They are comonly called killer whales, principally by the seals and salmon that have seen what happens to their brethren when these guys move in. Orcas view people and their boats as curiosities--or nuisances at worst--but never as dinner.

Sizable pods of orcas populate the area because of its abundance of food. They don't seem to mind the heavy shipping traffic in the area, so why would a stealthy kayak bother them?

We had come almost to the end of a ten-day paddle among the islands. Orcas had been visible in the distance--misty plumes of blowhole exhaust followed by several feet of straight black dorsal fin butter-knifing through the water. At night, they passed within a couple hundred yards of our shoreside campsite--invisible in the blackness, audible with each burst of breath.

Fighting a head wind two hours from our take-out point on Vancouver Island, we pulled our double Klepper up on the beach to rest for the final push. Around a rocky outcrop came four dorsal fins, bobbing and swaying about a hundred yards offshore. The little pod was staying on the surface, meandering south so slowly that the thought of paddling out to say hello chased the fatigue from our bodies.

We jumped into the boat and took pursuit. Moments later the dorsals sank from sight. We paddled hard for a couple minutes, our expectation growing that the whales would surface in the middle of Johnstone Strait, well beyond the range of our lumbering boat with its sagging pilots.

Then the water around the kayak seemed instantly to come to a boil, parting to expose four round black domes, shiny and wet, like hoods on cherry Fifties Cadillacs. The orcas surfaced so close that their exhalations showered us like a spring squall. Our shrieks combined the fear and exhilaration of being in the midst of such unpredictable critterdom. In the research literature about orcas, there is no record of an attack on a small craft. But we couldn't be sure we shared the same library with this crowd.

After a glance at us, the pod submerged as quickly as it had appeared. Stunned, we sat for a few moments, remembering how to breathe. I was fumbling for my camera when I heard the boiling sound again, this time behind me. All that was missing was the theme music from Jaws. I looked back to see six feet of dorsal fin looming like the conning tower of a submarine. The pod's bull was approaching. He pulled along the starboard side less than five feet away, his fin casting a shadow over the boat. I stared down to the water's surface. An eye the size of a cantaloupe stared back. His gleaming black skin was pitted and rutted with the sea's little brutalities. The dorsal was missing small chunks on its front and back edges. This fellow had been around. The look in his eye betrayed no shock at our presence. He could not think the same about what he saw in our eyes.

As he paralleled us, the bull appeared to be several feet longer than our kayak's 17 feet. His exhalation this time was even closer. Whale breath is potent, but we took no offense. He was so mammoth that his slightest tic could spin the boat or dump it. But as gently as he arrived, he submerged, a hiss of water closing over his back.

The other three orcas, a pair of adult females or young males and a smaller youngster, bobbed 30 feet off to port. The wind faded and the water's surface settled, while the afternoon sun was angled low enough to illuminate the water to the sea bottom 20 feet below. There we could see what drew this pod--undersea rubbing rocks. When high tide covers the shoreline's large rock outcrops, orcas love to drag themselves along the rough surfaces. These were having a good scratch.

The pair of same-size orcas appeared below us, scudding along the floor, revealing in nearly full light their lengths and skins of the blackest black and whitest white. As they passed out of sight, we looked up to spot the baby. It was coming straight at our bow.

We wondered whether it was schooled sufficiently to distinguish a kayak from driftwood. A bump from even a junior orca would constitute a knockout. Just as it reached the bow, its dorsal dipped and it went below. In a second it had passed under the boat. We looked down to see the slow, rhythmic pulse of its tail flukes. Its last upward flick sent a surge of water straight up under my seat. I felt myself rise as the sea momentarily swelled, then settled without a ripple. The youngster was in full control, and we were merely along for the ride.

For several minutes the four whales swooped underwater and popped to the surface, apparently as unconcerned with our presence as we were thrilled with theirs. They seemed to know always where we were, never coming up underneath us, yet sometimes surfacing close enough to be touched with our six-foot paddles. Finally, their back-scratching complete, they drifted back out to the central channel and plunged for a deep dive. They vanished from sight but never from memory.

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We're back on Costa Rica's Bebedero, still hung up on that log. Sea kayaks do well in oceans, lakes and broad, slow rivers, but this body of water was, at the moment, none of the above.

Overnight and unannounced, operators of a small dam upriver had released a portion of their reservoir to relieve pressure from recent rains. Our friend and trip leader, Terry Prichard, an experienced adventure-travel guide who has explored large swatches of Mexico and Central America by bicycle and kayak, had previously scouted the river and pronounced it class one--easy for opencockpit kayaks. But now the river's unexpectedly high volume made it class two with stretches of class three. Unlike the music business, moving up the charts in sea kayaking is not desirable. Our river seemed to be climbing with a bullet. The words of another longtime kayak co-conspirator, Kirk Kirkland, ran through my head: "If you don't get wet, cold and dirty, how can you call it fun?"

Costa Rica is divided by a range of mountains up to 11,000 feet high, and its Pacific side is more arid and less junglelike than the wet Caribbean side. Hardwood forests are broken up by cattle ranches and small villages. An endless variety of birds and plant life in an almost perfect year-round climate draws thousands of tourists annually. Like them, we sought to gawk upward, but each moment of pondering the lushness was followed by another swift turn in the river.

In the boat ahead, Roy Walters and Carolyn Driedger began waving their arms and pointing down to the water. They had just slipped their boat between two fallen trees. We knew something was there, but following only 20 feet behind in a four- to five-knot current with a less than agile boat left no chance to react. A rifle-like crack exploded between my legs, and the kayak came to a headthrowing stop.

We had passed over a submerged log, one end stuck into the river bottom, the other end pushing up the canvas floor of the kayak to a distressing two inches from my groin. The impact had shattered the floor panel and cracked two kayak ribs, all made of laminated wood built to withstand formidable blows. But, fortunately, the rubber-coated canvas skin had remained intact.

We failed to clear the log because my greatest asset--my outsized butt--had turned into a liability. Among sea kayaking's virtues are that it requires no great athletic talent, nor skill requiring long practice. Just about anyone can handle the double-bladed paddles from four to six hours a day. The chief physical limitation is butt fatigue. Unlike canoeing, there is little position-shifting in kayaking that can bring relief. So it is an ideal sport for the deskbound, most of whom have spent years unknowingly developing the sport's key resource.

But as part of a 6'7", 240-pound body, my resource forces the back end of our boat deeper into the water than most. What the preceding boat skidded over, our low-rider grabbed with the assurance of a riled Doberman.

After determining that we were in no immediate danger of sinking, I began to rock the boat. But the flexibility of the canvas skin had also served to envelop the stump, making a roll-off impossible.

"Now what?" Julia said in her everytime-we-go-down-a-rampaging-river-in-Central-America-this-happens tone. The shore was not distant, but the Bebedero serves as a sewage line to this part of the world. What didn't get us as bacteria might get us onshore as coral snakes or worse.

Fortunately, we were with experienced paddlers. Spotting our predicament, Roy and Carolyn worked the river's eddies and paddled back upstream behind us. Then they pulled along our port side. If we simply could lean our bodies onto their kayak, our lightened hull just might be lifted off by the rushing water.

The stern of the rescue boat began turning crossways to the current. The kayaks began separating. "Let go! Let go!" Roy shouted, and we threw ourselves back into our seats as he and Carolyn drifted sideways down the river. Now I began to think long-term. Did we have enough food in the boat to stay until the river dried up in the summer? We might, but the real shortage would be toilet paper.

The delirium of panic dissolved when I saw Roy and Carolyn working upstream for another try. In a few minutes they were beside us again. What they didn't know was that this time I would not let go. As separation began again, I ignored Roy's shouts and clamped both hands onto the rescue boat's gunwales. The current was pushing hard against its hull, pulling me out. I braced my knees against the sides of the cockpit and held on. As Julia shifted her weight to port, we began to slide off the log. Tipped nearly perpendicular to the water, our boat was finally released. I let go of the rescue boat and our kayak splashed down right side up.

"That wasn't so bad, was it?" I said with the studied nonchalance of an actor in a beer commercial. Over her shoulder, Julia fired a burner of a glare. She took her paddle and scraped the top of the river, sending a spray over my face.

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Two days later, after duct-taping the boat back together, we continued on to Costa Rica's Pacific beaches. On the south end of the Nicoya Peninsula, we came upon a primitive resort. The village had a single-lane dirt road, one small hotel and a handful of bungalows, a couple of open-air restaurants with chickens clucking in the yard, and a large bar whose main feature was a drain in the middle of the concrete floor. People had partied here before.

We pulled up onto the sandy, palmlined beach at about noon. A well-tanned European, amiable as he was inebriated, wobbled over with greetings. He had emerged from the porch of his bungalow in the company of two pretty young women. We told him we were staying only a single night. His face clouded over.

"No, no," he said in Scandinavian-accented English. He had been there two weeks, he said, and might stay forever. He swept his arms back toward his residence.

"Cabana," he said. Pointing where we stood he proclaimed, "Beach." Then he wheeled and gestured up the beach 50 feet: "Bar." He squinted, looking at us quizzically. "What else you need?"

The answer was simple: a kayak that will get you there.

"Orcas view people and their boats as curiosities--or nuisances at worst--but never as dinner."