Cedar Around the Island – De Kaag, NL

It has been a long time since Cedar (our cedar strip canoe) has touched the water.  Now dry docked in our back garden due to the loss of our front caravan tent she hasn’t seen much action this summer.

Plus, normal life of family obligations and work tends to put a damper on the canoe/kayak hobbies and this summer seems to be busier than past summers for some reason.

I spent the last week holed up in the house knitting socks for our upcoming canoe vacation.  I completed one sock and now I am almost done with the second wool/nettle sock.  I will wear these socks (and maybe photograph them) while we are on our Friesland vacation at the end of August.

Since we haven’t been on the water in the canoe for some time, we started out this morning with the normal loading, tie down, and then travel to the seasonal camping site.

Once on the water we glided towards our route around De Kaag island.

We used a new app that the hubby downloaded for riding his bike to work.  Notice he didn’t turn it on until we were in the middle of the lake and I was paddling in a 360 degree circle in order to keep it straight (yeah, right!).

We have used several different ways to keep our routes over the last three years. Google maps (after we paddle), NL Waterland maps (but they don’t track our routes), Garmin GPS  (which I find is hard to pull the tracking maps off after we return to home base). I have used all of them on this blog.

The one we used today seemed to work like we would hope.  Simple tacking on the water from the start point to the end point and then we could WhatsApp it to each other. Perfect as now I can add it as a jpeg to the blog without any extra work.

This was not one of our longest paddles or most scenic but we were on the water paddling together and that is what really counts in our book.

De Kaag island is water locked and the only way to get to the island is by boat or ferry.  This morning we got to experience the car ferry boat from the water point of view.

We headed around the island and back into the lake.  We don’t have pictures at this point as we were fighting the wake waves of the waterski boats.

Then we headed back across the open water towards the camping.  The wind had picked up. The hubby snapped a picture of me.  I know the waves to my sea kayak readers don’t look that bad, only ripples, but when I was holding the canoe on my own they felt huge!

We made it to our end point which was a coffee and apple pie at the bike ferry boat point. We enjoyed our coffee. Then we were told about a deep media conspiracy theory by two Austrian men.  Interesting, strange, and not in our book totally based on facts, we quickly broke off contact. Returned to Cedar waiting to let us paddle away to the safety of the water. Far away from conspiracy theory men.

We are now refreshed and ready to start a new week.

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