Canoe Excursions

On my vacation last week, one thing we went and did was rent a canoe.

We didn’t canoe with it. We just put it on the truck and drove around so people would think we were cool. IT worked.

OK, lying. Not about the canoe part or the “we’re so cool” part – we most definitely are (not) – but just the part about doing nothing but driving around. We canoed!

We had not ever done anything like it before, and didn’t quite know where to start, so a rental seemed like a good idea as any. We have been looking/thinking of some sort of boat for our adventures for a while now, but without a real house and real place to store it, we didn’t want to bother. Now that the house & storage are settled and we were on vacation, why NOT go and see if we can drown ourselves and a dog or three in the middle of a large body of water?

Turns out it was only one dog that got to go along, as our planned and only available day for the excursion was a day or so after Hunter put two holes in his brother defending Miles from that which needed not be defended. But that’s in the past now and brothers forgive. BUT, it did mean that Chase was not allowed to go and swim in potentially unclean waters with gaping wounds on his leg. I mean if it was just some surface wound? No problem! But these things were freakin’ down to the muscle OK? I could pull the skin and see darkness, and I could just envision him going swimming and his leg filling up with water and sinking.

Yes, I envisioned this. No one said I was a prophet. Ahem.

Worked out for the best actually. We rented a 15’ canoe and we had visions of us and at least two dogs paddling out along the lagoons, easy-going, moving fast in the right direction, the dogs jumping out and swimming and crawling back in and everyone having a Gay Ol’ Time, as the Flintstone’s Introduction singer might say. You know, pretty much like every Dawson’s Creek commercial ever. Visions are fun, right?

INSTEAD, it went more like this: we couldn’t paddle the damned boat straight to save our lives. I went left, she went right, the boat drifted off into a tailspin like in Top Gun but without the Star Power & turbines & jets and all that stuff & Goose lived in this version (he could swim. He’s a Goose for dog’s sake), it was a blast. We brought a dog. This might prove to be the Achilles' Heel in our vision overall, that we could do this with not just one, but two 85lb dogs. We hadn’t made it 5 feet from shore before we almost toppled over. Go ahead, ask me why there’s no galleries of the event in question up on the web. Answer? After almost drowning 5 feet from shore, I made the decision that perhaps the cameras – expensive little buggers that they are, filled with delicate precision electronics and being all wimpy around water, the wimpy electronic bastards – should stay in a dry, parking-spot-ridden truck whilst we attempt mass, slow suicide by water.

I’d like to say that eventually, we righted each situation, but we were only successful in one: we did eventually learn to paddle straight. Not fast, no! But straight, yes. The dog situation, however, did not go according to plan for more than 3 minutes at a time.

The canoe was made of some sort of plastic though I tell you I thought a few times maybe it was Play-Doh and we weren’t going to toppple over so much as fall the f*ck through the boat bottom. You could feel the water moving below your feet on the hull (is the canoe a hull?), and this didn’t sit well with our four-legged boat tipper, Hunter. He eventually got more used to it than initially, but he never quite said to himself or us “hey this craft is sound and trustworthy,” though he did get comfortable enough to start testing the limits of the boat by seeing just how far he could rock the boat over to one side by poking his body to that side and sticking his head out beyond to taste the water or stare down ducks flying by. How close to tipping? I was paddling and my elbows were getting wet. I kissed a fish.

Keeping a 15’ canoe made of Play-Doh from becoming a 15’ submarine made of Play-Doh with the helpful assistance of a dog proved more difficult than I had imagined. One dog was trouble enough, two dogs might be a stretch even with a more solid canoe, and THREE dogs is a crowd & a half on there. Dogs jumping out and swimming and making it back in the boat whilst we all smile and laugh and throw sticks and fish and other things that happen on the front of canoe brochures? Fat chance. There’ll be no mid-lake picnics with this setup, methinks.

Not sold on the canoe idea. Not sold at all. The people at the shop said something about some floaties you can put on the sides to stabilize the canoe against dogs and general tippiness, but as of now?

Not sold on the canoe idea. Not quite yet.

On the plus-side, I did get laid on the beach in the middle of the day. That's pretty cool, right? Sweet. Hey, maybe a canoe ISN'T A BAD IDEA AFTER ALL.