beige_alert | Paddling

Although the weather forecast for last weekend wasn't looking so nice, by the time the weekend came Sunday was looking better. The winds were strong, so Joyce and I avoided kayaking through the outer harbor and instead launched the kayaks directly into the Milwaukee River, from the spot across the street from the Milwaukee Public Market (At Water St. and St. Paul Ave). That's a reasonably nice spot to access the river, though it really helps to have two people to get the kayaks down the narrow ramp with the sharp turns at top and bottom.

You can see the track on the Google Earth view here. The weather started out quite warm, sunny, and very windy. As long as you keep some headway into the wind it isn't so bad, but even a brief time drifting will leave you going backwards on some strange heading and it takes some work to get turned around and moving again. Down between the buildings in the city the wind gets channeled in complicated ways. It seemed that we always had a headwind, no matter which way we were going.

There is a railroad bridge very low over the Menomonee River right where it joins the Milwaukee River which opens by rotating at the south side, which opened for Iroquois tour boat, so we got to see it swing back closed from up close.

Soon after passing that the rain started. The wind died down when the rain got going, though, so in that respect the weather improved. Joyce is quite the enthusiast, so being pretty big nuts we kept at it. The rain was intermittent but the wind stayed calm.

There was some sort of game, possibly soccer, going on at the Marquette athletic fields. Past 25th street the river makes a turn to the south, then passes under a set of railroad tracks. Those tracks funnel into the switching yard there. Last weekend we'd passed under the tracks at the other end of the yard as they pass over the canal. There are a bunch of narrow, low passages under the tracks, most of them mostly blocked with debris, but there is one clear. The water is quite shallow in this area. Layton Boulevard passes high overhead, and we turned around at that point. Someday we'll have to see how far we can get, the water is shallow but the kayaks don't draw much water. The Mitchell Park Domes are visible peaking up behind the riverbank. Sitting in a kayak in the river is about as low a vantage point as you can get, so it's always interesting what things you can see here and there in the semi-distance.

The trip totaled 11.5 km, in 3.5 hours. I'm starting to think that maybe the kayak paddle is a great application for carbon fiber. I have a very heavy, very cheap paddle. If I'm going to be making three hour trips on a regular basis, I ought to upgrade. I have roughly the cheapest kayak you can get, so I'm going to end up with a paddle more expensive than the kayak (possibly several times as expensive, depending on whether I end up going for the full-carbon option).