Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 19, 1995 TAG: 9503180001
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: G-8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEVE SILK THE HARTFORD COURANT
DATELINE: TRURO, MASS. LENGTH: Long
And there's no better way to explore those winding streams than aboard a sea kayak. On one of these sleek and silent craft, you can slip beneath the oaks and red maples, past the pitch pines, rugosa roses and beach plum just as quietly as one of the kingfishers working the river. You can watch painted turtles splash as they drop off sun-warmed logs, listen to the summery sounds of red-winged blackbirds or spy on circling hawks.
Let your gaze drift toward the horizon, where weather-beaten houses crest rolling moors and the whoosh of the far-off surf sounds like a roaring wind. Sometimes, when the pogy are running, you might feel them drum against the hull of your boat as they surge upriver riding a tiny wave of their own making.
Running rivers is just the start of what you can do in a sea kayak on the Cape. There are kettle ponds to explore, waves to surf, bays to cruise and, for the intrepid and skillful, there's the two-mile paddle from Chatham out to the Monomoy Islands, where you can share the sea with harbor seals and gray seals.
Sea kayaking may also have a certain cachet among the local literary set - sometime Cape resident and globe-trotting writer Paul Theroux has been paddling around the Cape and out to the islands for years.
His stories in travel magazines may have helped to popularize the sport. Theroux's most recent travel book - ``The Happy Isles of Oceania'' - took him paddling through the islands of the South Pacific.
Don't be deterred by chilly images of Eskimos paddling among ice floes, of sealskin-suited Nanooks slinging harpoons, or even of a hard-charging, closer-to-home paddler sealed into an 18-foot splinter of an easily flipped boat. (Also easily righted with a technique known as an Eskimo roll.)
The sport of sea kayaking need only be as difficult - or as easy - as you choose.
A first-timer can settle into an open-cockpit kayak as easily as onto a Barcalounger. It's something like sitting atop a big surfboard, albeit one with a keel, to make tracking (traveling in a straight line) easier. Sea kayaks are also typically longer and sleeker than those used in rivers. Traditionally, they are used in open water.
The boats are tippy - no worse than a canoe - but maneuverable. An open cockpit cuts the novice's fear factor greatly: You aren't connected to your kayak with a spray skirt, so if the craft flips, you simply slide off the boat and into the water. (In kayaking, a spray skirt is the snug neoprene skirt worn around the paddler's waist and fitted onto the kayak's cockpit.)
Paddling a sea kayak is a breeze. Eric Gustafson, a kayaking guide who works the Outer Cape, has taken his 80-year-old grandmother out paddling. And he has taken kids as young as 8.
More regularly, Gustafson, a ski patroller at Mount Snow in Vermont in winter and instructor of surfing and windsurfing in summer, can be seen leading small groups of novice kayakers through the rivers, bays and waves of the Cape. His aptly named business, Funseekers Ltd., introduces many a first-timer to the singular joys of paddle travel.
One of the most popular runs is the Pamet River, a mostly freshwater stream flowing haphazardly across the outer Cape from just inside the dunes at Ballston Beach to Pamet Harbor and Cape Cod Bay. On the map, the Pamet looks like a series of squiggly, skinny lines interrupted by chubby ellipses. With its many twisting turns, dead ends and interlinked channels, the river invites exploration.
One of Gustafson's typical two-hour paddles on the Pamet leads through a changing landscape of hillsides, moors and freshwater marsh. Pamet Harbor was once full of shipyards, and the industry gobbled up much of the oak that covered this part of the Cape so thickly that wandering pilgrims routinely got lost. Today the landscape has a more open aspect. The river's banks are a tangle of shrubby growth, with a skyline of cattails, pitch pine, red maple and scrub oak.
Instead of paddling upstream from the harbor, Gustafson likes to slip his kayaks into the water at a spot near Massachusetts 6 in Truro. There's a good launching spot, and within a few paddle strikes boaters are in country that seems as far away from a T-shirt shop as you can get on the Cape.
Here, the river's width undulates along the way, widening at times to 20 feet or more, and narrowing, just as often, to an arm's breadth. Sometimes encroaching vegetation creates a tunnel so narrow that boaters must stow their paddles and grab at slender branches to pull themselves along, rather like Humphrey Bogart on the African Queen.
In more open areas, you're free to contemplate the dramatic play of light that has lured countless artists and photographers to the Cape. Change is its only constant. At the edges of the day, sculptural sunlight rakes across the landscape like a Midas, burnishing everything with gold. The clear cleansing light of midday brings its own sparkle. Throughout the day, clouds boil up into the sky like angry genies, then disperse and drift off peacefully. Or boil up and pour rain. The weather is hard to predict, even by New England's changeable standards.
While drifting along this pathway gouged out by melting glaciers 10,000 years ago, Gustafson keeps an eye on the wildlife, and points out passing critters, from herons stalking the shallows to muskrats munching the greenery.
On the river, Gustafson says paddlers usually fall into one of two camps. Some are racers, with windmilling paddles that propel them upstream and down with scenery-blurring speed.
Others are more content to go with the flow, with one eye on the river and the other trained on the abundant flora and fauna. They know there's no reason to hurry. After all, it's only a backroad.
by CNB