Tag Archives: Kayak

07202019 – Kayak

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We took our Kayaks with us while camping at Hungry Jack Lodge. On our first day we decided to kayak from the lodge to Honeymoon Bluff which you could see across the way. We unloaded the boats and blew up the SUP, packed a lunch and headed out. Pretty quickly, one tired kid got tied onto my kayak. Heading towards the Bluff wasn’t too bad. We had a good wind to our back. Hiking to the bluff wasn’t too bad either. From the landing spot it was maybe 1/2 mile to the trail and the trail was 3/4 miles with a little bit of climbing, but nothing too steep. We enjoyed our lunch on the rocks, took in the views, saw a bald eagle, and headed back down.

View from Honeymoon Bluff

Heading back to the lodge was a struggle. The wind was basically coming straight at us and would be the whole time. We tied up the second kid to the SUP and paddled. And paddled. We took a little break behind one of the peninsulas. But after that, there wasn’t a clear spot to get to. We tried going mostly straight across to the other-side to get a little bit of relief. It was a lot of work in my flat water kayak, so you can only imagine the work on the SUP. At one point we did switch out a kid kayak paddle for the SUP paddle to make it a little easier. We finally made it back to the beach and relaxed and swam!

Playing before paddling back

It was approximately a 4 mile paddle in total (depending on how much the wind blew us around!

07022019 – Kayak

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The kids and I had a great time kayaking today. We took the 3 kayaks out onto Cedar Lake and paddled over to Lake of the Isles and then came back and toured the 3 beaches of Cedar Lake!! We started at the South Beach which has some new amenities, but the swim area is pretty small and mucky with lots of seaweed. We then paddled to Hidden or East Beach. This has a lot of nice shade and a nice swim area with lifeguards (oddly the only ones out today). There are some unique characters here, but not quite the reputation that it used to have. In fact, we saw two different people get cited by the Park Patrol for what appeared to be alcohol violations. Unfortunately, we realized that a pair of flip flops had been left at South Beach so we paddled back there. There are some nice houses on that part of the lake and it was fun to pick out which ones we liked!! We looked them up when we got home, one is currently for sale for $3.3 million if you are interested!! After retreiving the flip flops we made our way back to Cedar Point Beach which is a good mix of traditional beach activities and good sized swim area. Alas it was time to leave and we paddled back to the “ramp” and headed home! I checked and we did at least 3.5 miles of paddling (assuming we did straight lines and point to point).

We had a lot of fun and will probably do it again!

05262019 – Bike and Kayak

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The Mountain Bike trails opened up yesterday afternoon and I wanted to get some dirt action before the rain on Monday. I also didn’t want to tear up my legs for Murph either so I did the North Loop twice at an easy-ish pace.  The Luce Line is still flooded between Wirth Parkway and the entrance, but I found a nice work around that followed the railroad tracks. I found a trail heading back into the woods and was getting ready to turn on it when a dude came running out and he confirmed it would drop me into the loop. It was in great shape, except one section that was closed due to flooding still, but it had a nice work around.  I did about 6.5 miles and it felt good.

Son had been asking to go kayaking with me so the two kids and I ended up going to Hyland park and kayaking on the lake.  It was fun and sunny – I got burnt. I didn’t record the paddle as it was mostly leisurely.  It was a lot of fun though!! Three kayaks is a lot of logistics, but the kids were great helpers!

05052019 – Run & Kayak

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I started off the morning with a 10k time trial. The Loppet trails were finally open so I thought I would hit them.  The Karate Monkey trails were in great shape, Area 36 was still a little wet and not fully opened. The plan was to do the second 5k faster than the first. I was thrown off a little bit on the distances by the full trails not being open. I checked and the Luce Line was flooded as well so I briefly hit the one set of mountain bike trails to get me back to the main trails.

My first 5K was 30:58 and the second was 28:51. Definitely not as fast as I would like!  The total distance was 7.4 miles in 1:13:10.

In the afternoon I decided to get my new Kayak out for a spin. I put in at Cedar Lake Point Beach and did the perimeter of Brownie Lake and most of Cedar. It was definitnely different than canoeing and sitting in the same position for awhile was tough.  I did about an hour and 2.8 miles.  I did some of it hard and some of it just relaxed especially when I saw the turtle party on Cedar!!  I ended up buying a kayak that could be good for casual paddling with the family for either Christy or I instead of shelling out money for a faster one!