Goin' with the Seasons: A Seakayaking Trip that Was None

Since I don’t keep this blog updated as much as I had hoped, I will write about current things that are going on and in between write about my first couple of weeks here. I don’t have the intention of sharing every single event anyway, so this should work out fine.

A couple of weeks ago, I signed up for a weekend seakayaking trip with a couple of friends and fellow international students. After looking forward to this trip for a long time, we finally went kayaking on Saturday morning. However, things turned out to be quite complicated at times and plans changed several times before and over the course of the weekend. The first change was from the expected SEAkayaking to normal kayaking due to flood and storm warnings on the coast. Instead, the Kale and Nate, the two guides that should take us (i.e. a group of six international students), decided to go to a lake in the northeast of Maine.

On Saturday morning, we were all more or less ready to go at 7 am but we had to wait for the van for way too long, meaning I could have slept for another two hours. Anyways, after some basic kayaking instructions indoors, loading the van, and some more complications, we finally left campus. Like the last couple of weekends, we were very lucky with the weather. After a quick and very necessary coffee stop, we drove north for almost three hours. On the way to Pocumcus Lake I saw my first moose! It was only for a short time, but everyone in our group got really excited and we took it as a good sign.

Kale + our kayaks

We still drove quite a while longer before we finally arrived at our destination. Such a long car trip makes you hungry, so we had lunch before we packed up our stuff and left in our kayaks. Things had been a little complicated before, and from the beginning of actually kayaking, it was very windy which made it very difficult to navigate through the water, not lose each other, etc. My last kayak trip had been a while ago, so I wasn’t too surprised when I “stranded” in shallow water and needed the help of Nate to get out again. Realizing that things would not work out the way we had hoped (again), we decided to just go along the shore until we’d find a good place to camp.

For that we didn’t really have to go very far. We found a beautiful secluded beach on an island (the beach was literally an island itself) where we decided to spend the night. Since it had gotten pretty warm and the wind had died down, our group of international students decided to partake in one of our favorite pastimes: swimming. We didn’t actually swim a lot, but just went into the water and enjoyed the warm water and the sun. Then it was time to build our tents (which we didn’t, our guides did) and start preparing dinner (ditto). But we all went to look for some fire wood and that just made me feel like a child again – in a good way.

For dinner we had pasta with vegetables which was quite nice and, as a surprise, a highly praised dessert: grasshopper pie. It was…disgusting! However, the guides were really surprised to find out that we didn’t enjoy it. Luckily, they went to bed early and we stayed up for a long time, enjoying the fire and watching the stars. There was no light from any civilization nearby, so you could see an amazing amount of stars. After the fire died down we finally had to go to bed, i.e. our sleeping bags outside. I didn’t really get a lot of sleep because temperatures dropped to around zero that night.

In the morning, the sun more or less woke me up, and after a quick breakfast, we headed out again. For a while we went along the shore again and simply enjoyed the beautiful weather and the amazing landscape. Towards noon we turned to head back to the van to go back home.