School should always be this much fun. They say good things come to those who wait, and I must say this time it was true. Our highly esteemed kayaking instructor who rashly canceled our original trip due to stormy weather (we all think he had a hot date and blew us off, the weather was quite calm) rescheduled our sea kayaking camping adventure for this past week-end.
Ooh baby! The makers of Prozac would go out of business if the general public were inclined to do such things. The first night we camped in the woods behind Berm Beach after leaving from Echo Cove - nice, but no big deal. The next day we kayaked to Benjamin Island. Pretty basic stuff until we reached the north end of the island. Dan and I shared a kayak because I was too much of a wimp to kayak alone, but I'm grateful to him. He showed me how to make kayaking a pleasure, encouraging me to not fight the water and work so hard. He set a pace that was easy for me to keep of a slow, steady rhythm, and that was when I fell in love with kayaking.
Right around the time I was exceedingly aware of how hurt my back, how tight my arms, how sore my shoulders, we became even more aware of a gang of sea lion bachelors. Brock compared them to a gang of teenage boys when they slithered into the water and bobbed their torsos, greeting us with barks and grunts, flipping around in the water and approaching us as we watched them.
It must have been a boys' week-end in the animal world - on the other side of us were a pod of bachelor humpbacks swimming along the opposite side of the channel. They exhaled through their blowholes and showed us lots of tail as they went in the opposite direction. According to Brock, the women whales in Hawaii don't want anything to do with them yet because they're too young too date - kind of like my little brother when he was twelve approaching seventeen year old babes and asking them their age. When they responded, he'd say "What a coincidence! So am I!" They'd laugh, ruffle his hair, and move on. Between the whales and the sea lions, it was tough to decide which way to look. Because the whales were in the distance and the sea lions right next to us, they won my attention.
Well, I guess that's the way of testosterone in all male animals. I think the sea lions got competitive because they followed us and did quite a performance of aquatic ballet. They swam with us alongside our kayaks, leaping out of the water like dolphins and flip-slapping the water while following us to the southeast side of the island. Most of them stayed behind, but a couple followed us, watching while we set up camp. I forgot I was exhausted from the magic of that moment.
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