Sea Kayaking

Sea kayaking holds a special place for us as we met sea kayaking in Barkley Sound, honeymooned up in Johnstone Strait on a kayak camping trip, and did a number of wonderful trips with our daughters later on.

We came to love the wild west coast of Vancouver Island. A pair of sea otters swam by this cosy camp in the Kyuquot Sound area. Note the campfire and beach log backrests.

We purchased a Klepper folding kayak which impressed us with it's seaworthiness. Here we are sailing into Brooks Bay on the north side of the Brooks Peninsula.

Sea kayak camping is a wonderful combination of backpacking and car camping in terms of what you can bring for cooking and camp craft. We have a special half-size dutch oven for baking.

The folding kayak's ability to fly as regular airline baggage opened up some distant paddling options, such as here in the Florida Keys, tucked into the mangroves.

In addition, the Klepper's beam extended with inflatable sponsons actually makes it stable enough to serve as a dive boat, as anchored here over a reef in the Keys.

Joan took the Klepper to the Sea of Cortez desert islands with a friend, beach camping in the islands north of La Paz.

We bought the Klepper with a trip to Greece in mind, where we beach camped and paddled among the islands of the Aegean Sea. This is in the harbor on Kalymnos Island.

The boat cart from Klepper that we travelled with allowed not only the assembled boat to be wheeled around fully loaded, but also was handy for getting about on inter-island ferries in the Mediterranean.

Klepper makes a complicated sail rig involving lee boards and a boom, but we made a simple downwind jib with a collapsable boathook which we used regularly in the Aegean, with it's predicable summer northerlies.

We travelled by ferries and train to the Dalmatian Coast of (what was then) Yugoslavia but found the lack of beaches made camping to be more difficult than in Greece, though the water was clear and warm.

Finding a smooth level site for the tent was a challenge on the jagged limestone shores of the Dalmatian Coast. One time we even camped on the terrace of an old castle to get a flat site.

We took the Klepper back to it's home waters in Germany and paddled down the Danube River into Austria, staying in very civilized kanu camps on the way. This is a chute designed to let kayakers pass by dams without even getting out of their boats. Very exciting!

We discovered the Klepper made trips to remote parts of the Vancouver Island coast possible even with children. We chartered a seaplane out of Tofino to drop us off on the beach at Hesquiat Harbor for a week.

Here, in San Josef Bay on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island, Will and toddler Katherine sail back from a visit to Sea Otter Cove.

A well travelled boat: Greece, Yugoslavia, Germany, Austria, United States, Mexico, and Canada, bringing home a whale rib we found on the shore.

…and of course it was inevitable that our daughters would grow up to be capable and enthusiastic kayakers themselves. These 9 foot plastic kayaks stow on Chaika and are great for exploring anchorages.