A Newbies First Kayaking Trip

I don't have any photos from my first trip.  In the mid nineties I was living in an old carriage house on the north shore of Long Island, NY during grad school.  A friend of mine had an Aquaterra/Perception sea kayak that he kept at my place because of my proximity to the beach.  After a few frustrating evenings of surf fishing for striped bass and bluefish I realized that my friends kayak would be the perfect way to get my lure out to the feeding frenzy that these fish often invoke while chasing menhadden.  He did say I could use it if I wanted to, how hard can it be.   So I grabbed a paddle, a pdf, my swimsuit, a bass fishing rod and a couple lures to put in my lap.  No spray skirt, no rod holders, no gaf, and no net.  I didn't even have a stringer.  Somehow I got into the kayak and managed a beach launch with little effort and after a few moments of getting my balance realized that I wasn't going to tip over unless I did something stupid... "don't do anything stupid" I kept telling myself.   Of course then I did something relatively stupid, I would a lure out behind me and start trolling the current seams near with my fishing rod simply resting on my shoulder.  About 10 minutes into my first attempt my reel clicker goes nuts and I'm hooked into a 10 lb bluefish.  "Sweet!  Hey he's pulling me! Cool!  Wait..wait, oh crap he's going under the kayak, now what?"  The kayak is too long to get my rod tip around the nose, so I hold the rod between my knees and grab the paddle and turn the kayak into the fish without falling in.  The next time the fish attempted this move I was able to turn the kayak by letting the fish pull me around.  Eventually (10-15 min) I manage to tire the fish out after a few nice runs and a decent first sleigh ride.  I bring the bluefish along side of the kayak and grab it's tail and land it.  I look down... Oh crap, look at those teeth.  With out pliers I carefully get the lure out, now what?  Should I let it go?  Hell no.  But where to put it?  I tried stuffing it in the deck bungies.. too big.   So I whacked the fish hard against the side of the kayak to make sure it was not going to bite and stuff it in the cockpit down by my feet thinking to myself, my buddy isn't going to like the smell all that fish slime is going to leave in a few days, oh well.   I spent many more evenings that summer doing almost the same thing with more bluefish and striped bass falling victim to my secret fishing technique of using a kayak.  It wasn't for another six or seven years that I discovered sit-on-tops and the sport we now know as kayak fishing.

Brian

Great Story...
I can't wait to land my fist fish!!

Chuck

Launched at incoming tide out of Arcadia in sca conditions Monday.  Had a blast fighting the wind and tidal currents all the while trying to fish for chums.  I know what an sca is, knock others for getting lost in them, and even did a stint with the NWS in the 90s, but I'm too stubborn and/or stupid to change plans, plus had already scheduled a day off work for my trial kayak fishing trip.

Arcadia sits just outside the south shore of Hammersley Inlet, an east-west narrows which is well known for having a strong tidal current.   I headed NNE from the launch, Hammersley well to my port,  into some good chop with about 20 kt. wind gusts.  Out in the open it started to get rather miserable for a first fishing trip so I had my eye on a protected cove on the other side of the inlet.  I was about a 1/4 mi. across getting battered by 2+ foot wind waves that seemed to change direction as fast as the wind did.  Throw in the tidal influence of the adjacent inlet, that made things very difficult to read, and it didn't take long before I asked myself WTF am I doing out here?

With conditions now worsening, rather than turn and head back to the launch, I thought of something better.  Head toward the south shore of the inlet and get some protection from the wind so I could drop anchor and fish.  It worked, sort of.  As I got within 100 yards of the shore, the wind and waves calmed a bit, and I even got to fish for a minute or two. On about 2 minutes into fishing I notice I'm drifting a little to fast and decide to drop anchor to slow things down.  Hmm? Didn't work so I pull anchor -- no I didn't! I kept fishing till I started to hear this roaring noise "downstream".

You can tell just by looking at a chart of the inlet that water will just pour through the thing, especially just inside the funnel shaped east end at flood tide. Throw in a WSW wind and you get standing waves at the chokepoint -- they sort of make what can be described as a roaring noise.

At some point I started to care more about personal safety than fish, I think the light bulb went off just as I rounded a small, densely treed point of land. The roaring got louder, and these whitecaps began to reveal themselves.  OK, what to do?  Don't panic (guys plow through the surf in these all the time right?), pull in the fishing line, then the anchor, then paddle like hell.

Well, I grabbed hold of my bsteves-spot hybrid anchor system. Except my anchor reel was devised from a kite string spooler.  Resourceful? yes.  Good for quickly winding up your anchor out of the water in an emergency? absolutely NOT.  Needless to say I went from kite spool to hand-over-hand as the shoreline began to race by.  Oddly, the kayak would catch a roller from the NW as gusts of wind blew maple leaves NE across the inlet. Some weird juxtapositioning of wind, waves and currents.

Kayak pointed downstream, anchor now onboard, body still onboard, I was so close to getting sucked in that I began to first paddle backwards away from the "rapids".  Didn't work.  I wasn't in any mood to be spit out at Shelton so I did a hard 180 and paddled against the current -- and fiercely.  Glancing at the shoreline, at times it would look like I was paddling in place, and I was giving it 100 fricken percent (without re-injuring my 2 yrs old shoulder repair) but after a few minutes the roaring began to fade and I could slow my pace a little.  How great it was to back out in the regular waves and wind again and headed for the boat launch too tired to fish.

Sweet. Keep learning and pretty soon you will be seeking out those "river" features for fun.

Sounds like you found a rip. I'm not sure of your exact location, but I know in the SJ's currents can be pretty big, I've run into some 6-8kt currents and a few rips around 10kts....Faster than I can paddle. Wind only makes the waves bigger. Usually can't paddle or back out once you're withing 10-20ft. Your best option is to point down current with a slight ferry angle away from the direction of flow. You've got to use that energy in the current instead of fight it. Same with strong wind.

If you've already got sucked into the wave train, best bet is to brace and ride it out until you feel confident enough to ferry out of the flow.

You should look into Washburne current tables & atlas. I don't go to the sound/SJ's without it. You can use those currents to your advantage when you have a current atlas to consult and know what's going on with the water before you get there.

NANOOK - So is ferrying out of the rip current sort of like sailing upwind? Tacking to either side rather than against?  If so, I think I get what you are saying.  Thanks.

Launched at incoming tide out of Arcadia in sca conditions Monday.  Had a blast fighting the wind and tidal currents all the while trying to fish for chums.  I know what an sca is, knock others for getting lost in them, and even did a stint with the NWS in the 90s, but I'm too stubborn and/or stupid to change plans, plus had already scheduled a day off work for my trial kayak fishing trip.

In small-plane aviation this is called, "get-there-itis" and it kills pilots and passengers.  The urge to get there, to keep to your schedule, to keep to your planning, causes some pilots to fly into marginal weather conditions.  Keep that in mind for next time. 

Thanks Dem,

While my story is truthful, I got carried away with adjectives a little :-),  and never felt like I was in real danger.  I did push my luck a slight bit dealing with a series of potentially dangerous events, and was probably just 1 more mistake, or small accident (think broken paddle leash, snagged fishing line etc) away from p###sing in my wetsuit :-).   Learned a lesson.