Kayaking Hanalei River
On Monday, our second full day, we had planned to kayak the Hanalei River. We chose this river for our first ever kayaking experience because it was very calm and because we could go on a self-guided tour. Despite being beginners, we just like to be on our own schedule.
We chose to kayak in a "double" which means its a two-seater. We put Suzanne up front and the "power" (me) in the back. After a quick Q&A with the guide on the dock, we were put in.
To get to the river, we had to navigate a narrow, mildly-winding channel. The funny thing is that this was probably the most challenging part of the whole experience! Only a few feet into our journey, the channel begins a gentle bend to the right. The trouble is, there were sizable sticks pointing a foot or two out from the left-hand bank. It reminded me of a medieval guantlet. Any mistake we made would be punished by a brush against these spears. Fortunately, it looked worse than it was.
The second small challenge was getting out of the channel and into the river. There’s a sandbar in between and we had to use the paddles to shove ourselves into the river. If we had been a single, perhaps this would have been easier.
Once in the river, it took us a bit to get our rhythm. We crab-walked for a while; making good progress for a while, then over-steering one way or another. After a while, we seemed to know when we needed to make our corrections and we were able to get moving pretty nicely. Though the stream was calm, we were going upstream initially, so we had to keep paddling or we would lose momentum to the stream’s current.
To be honest, the sight-seeing wasn’t that great. The problem was that the river level was at least five feet below the bank. So it was difficult to see beyond the river. We could only see what lined the river and while it was quite beautiful, there wasn’t much variety.
If there were sights to be seen, they were hard for us to capture on film. We conservatively stowed the cameras away in dry bags, so the challenge was to fetch the camera while the sight to be captured was still in a capturable state. There were a couple of times when a picture didn’t get taken because of these factors. So this is why there aren’t many pics from the kayaking trip.
We didn’t find the paddling too challenging. It was represented that the route we took was to take 1.5 hours each way. However, we made the entire trip (there and back) in roughly 1.5 hours. And we took it pretty easy on the way back since the current did most of the work.
The downside to the trip is that Suzanne tweaked a muscle in her upper back and neck area. Its one of those injuries that restricts your motion, so she was disappointed. Otherwise, we each are not sore, so there are no lasting effects. We both avoided blisters between our thumb and index fingers as we detected them developing and modified our rowing style.
So in short, it was definitely worth doing, but kind of an underwhelming experience. Its possible we chose the wrong river within Kauai and that would have made all the difference. As we discussed this, we both concluded that the experience was much better than sitting at an office in Dallas…even with an injury involved.