Success and Failure…….. or is it Failure and Success?

Don’t worry I won’t be writing about anything “deep” unless you are talking about the waters of Lake Ontario. I’m just kidding and that was actually a very poor attempt to use a play on words. I am actually talking about the second and third days of kayak ownership by Karen and me.

Yesterday the waters of Lake Ontario were extremely choppy. Karen and I looked out of our apartment window (which has a very distant view of the lake) and noticed some white caps on the water but after short deliberations we decided to go for it. I mean after all it was only our second day of owning kayaks and we weren’t going to let choppy water stop us. So we loaded up the kayaks in the Jeep and headed down to the water. The load-up in the Jeep hasn’t exactly been mastered, but we are definitely getting there.

When it came time to put our boats in the water I noticed a couple down near where we launch the kayaks. I decided to wait until they disappeared until I would attempt to mount my kayak. I was already anticipating that I was most likely going to make a fool of myself in the choppy water. So with only a one person audience (Karen), I decided to get into my kayak in waist-deep water. I would not normally get into the boat in that deep of water but the waves were breaking too hard in the shallow water. I finally hopped into my kayak which worked out fairly well but almost immediately after doing so a decent-sized wave came into shore and completely flipped my kayak over. Don’t you worry though, I slid out of my kayak safely onto the rocky lake bottom, which to my amazement did not feel good at all. As I came out of the water I noticed that there was a man standing next to Karen eating a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken (or “KFC” as their slick marketing campaign wants us to call it).

The man was obviously laughing at me and he apparently muttered to Karen, “that guy is nuts.” I am fairly certain that this man manifested himself only to watch me fail in my second day of kayaking. When I came into shore he was nowhere to be found and may have disappeared completely. There have been a few cases of spontaneous combustion in the history of the world and I am actually concerned that this strange phenomenon may have occurred right before our eyes yesterday. He laughed at me though so maybe it was “instant karma” as John Lennon said. Needless to say, after my incident we loaded up the Jeep with our boats and decided that it was not our day.

Today was a much more successful day on the waters of Lake Ontario for Karen and me. I got home from work early and we headed down to the water. We launch the boats from inside the Madison Barracks marina which is shielded from the choppy waters for the most part and had no trouble getting into the water. We had a successful one hour outing and came in right before a storm hit. Redemption indeed……….

Pictures From Today...