Sometime soon after Terri and I moved to New Bern, maybe early May 2022, on a warm, sunny afternoon, I took my first paddling trip in Craven County since moving down east. There is a canoe and kayak boat launch a few blocks from my house on the Trent River. The river curves around our neighborhood, named River Bend for that reason. There are several creeks running through our town, which feed into the Trent. Then the Trent feeds into the Neuse River close to New Bern, which is why many businesses in our area are called Twin Rivers something or other. If you keep going down the Neuse River, then it empties into Pamlico Sound, which joins the Atlantic Ocean on the other side of the Cape Lookout Outer Banks.
I have paddled, hiked and camped in this area many times over many decades, which is one reason we chose to move here. But I had not been flat water kayaking for about five years, so I felt quite rusty and somewhat vulnerable. Plus, being 70 years old and paddling alone did not help the situation. I moved cautiously around the boat and across the water.
The hardest part of the trip was toting my boat with assistance from a set of removable wheels form the parking lot, across some rough ground through the woods, following a long, winding dock and descending a steep put-in to the river.
The next hardest part is the dock has a customized kayak launch trough with an over-head metal bar to help with entering and exiting the boat. But, despite this assistance, the dynamics worked out so that upon trying to get in or out of the cockpit, the boat had a tendency to scoot out from under me and slide away into the river, out of reach. It was touch and go with a lot of grunting and straining to manage these maneuvers.
The actual paddling was fairly innocuous. The scenery was southern coastal, with black water, cypress knees, Spanish moss and swamps lining the river banks. I started going upriver to avoid having to fight the current on my way back home later. A little way upriver was a small island, which I circumnavigated and headed back down stream. At the bottom of the island I ended up near the dock, so I made it back to the launch site.
Since them I have taken several more trips. Each time I tweak, adjust and improve my gear so as to make things safer and smoother.
