And speaking of dogs and kayaking, I happened to get close to the beach while my dog was there playing. He decided to try to follow me…
My kayak is over 20 years old.
As I mentioned in The Kayak Thread, I got a sit-inside kayak with my REI rewards in July. My 20-year-old Ocean Kayak is a sit-on-top. I’d never paddled when I got it, and I was also heavier; so I got a big one – 13 feet with a rudder, and three feet wide. I wanted stability because the waves in the Pacific Ocean can be three or four feet on a calm day. Compared to my sit-on-top, the sit-inside feels less stable.
My experience has generally been that employers really want you to take advantage of the perks and they’ll give you a pretty wide latitude in what is reasonable in order to do so. If too few people take advantage of a perk, someone in HR is going to be asked hard questions about whether this incentive program was designed poorly and how it can be improved so you’re generally helping someone else’s KPIs by using your perks.
To a company, not enough people using the perks means they’re going to have to up their salary requirements to stay competitive and perks are a lot more tax advantaged than salaries so companies prefer compensating you via perks rather than salary whenever it makes sense.
Good post, and I agree. It’s great PR as well. Still, getting stingy instead wouldn’t be the worst corporate decision ever made by a long shot, so it wouldn’t shock me. LOL
When my gf used her fitness perk on a ski lift ticket for the season, it wasn’t as expensive as the program allowed. They offered her a “lift ticket” (is that what it’s called? A season pass to ride the lifts to the top) for me.
She asked if I wanted to go skiing with her, and I said sure, Seven Springs is a nice place to go. She asked if I would want lessons and I told her hell no. I’d want a pass to the Foggy Google, the bar at the bottom of the slopes. She thanked her company, but declined their kind offer.
I agree with this point. Mrs. solost and I kayak together (in separate kayaks) a lot, but she doesn’t fish at all, and I like to kayak fish, which would bore her to death. She likes the exercise and changing scenery of river kayaking, and the only way she enjoys fish is already filleted, cooked, and served. So I’ll go out on my own to fish, usually on a local lake.
She insists I tell her which lake I’ll be on, so I’ll say “tell them to drag (X) Lake for my body if I don’t return”, or “if they find my overturned kayak on (Y) Lake, it means I finally faked my death”.
I turned my son on to kayaking and kayak fishing when he was a little kid. Nothing like a big bass pulling you around! When he moved to Florida he left his old kayak with me, but as soon as he got a job a kayak was his first purchase. He goes out on the Gulf and brings back dinner a couple nights a week.
I know! It’s a lot more fun than fishing from a powerboat. Not to mention, when a bass jumps into the air hitting on a crankbait, it’s more dramatic when you’re seeing it from so close to the surface of the water.
I see one (potentially) glaring omission. What do you drive? Where are you storing your kayak? If you have pickup you’ll be okay but if you have a car & want to keep it in your yard, you’ll need a roof rack or trailer to get it back & forth.
Where she lives, you can buy one of the (limited, they sell out) permits to keep your kayak at the designated racks on the beach, but only from Apr to Oct; if you had that situation, you’d only need to transport it 2x / year, once there & once back home. We weren’t able to get permits this year so in reality only can go in the summer when the kid is around (he has a pickup, but is now away back in college)
One of mine is a two-person inflatable but in reality, it takes up a lot of space folded up & is much easier to setup at home (powered fan for inflation) & bring home in the pickup to wash off & let dry before folding it up to put it away; I know if I fold it up & put it back in the bag there I’m not going to unfold it & let it dry before repacking it at home.
If I was buying new, for transport w/o a rack, I’d look at a foldable one.
My wife likes to sit and look at the scenery. She’s never going to develop her paddling arms that way. I like the exercise. I like to be moving all the time I’m on the water. When we go out together, I spend more time floating than paddling. Also: I made a 15-foot line from 550 cord, with a brass snap hook on each end, just in case I need to give her a tow.
Did I mention this already? She thinks we could use a tandem kayak. That way I could do all of the paddling, and she can just sit and look.
When my daughter was ~15 I took her, her boyfriend, and my son on a kayak trip on the upper Allegheny River. It was a beautiful day and we were all enjoying it. Then my daughter had a migraine kick in. We were about 90 minutes from the take out. I tied a line from her bow to my stern and began paddling hard.
I didn’t realize how good I’d gotten at paddling until her boyfriend suggested taking a turn towing her. I tied her line to his stern and off we went. It was embarrassing how slow we were going. I let him tow her for 15 minutes, then suggested we trade off, and he was pretty winded, so he agreed. When we reached the takeout she had fallen asleep in her kayak.
Torso rotation is the golden path!
My wife likes to move. It’s all I can do to keep up with her sometimes! Though, she has a longer, more narrow kayak that’s faster than my wider, more stable fishing kayak (at least, that’s what I tell myself when I’m struggling to keep up 
).
We have a local river that has a relatively slow current (though when the water’s high it can be fairly strong), so we paddle upriver a couple miles, then float downhill. It makes things logistically much simpler than doing the 2 vehicle thing when only going downriver. Most people don’t do that, though-- when we paddle upriver we’re always passing people coming toward us who are leisurely floating ‘downhill’, drinking and smoking, telling us “you’re going the wrong way har har!”.
I tried that early on, and I still do it sometimes; but I find it easier to just use my arms.
Yes, I love doing this. If we are doing a simple float downstream I’ll also paddle back up an interesting section of faster water and do that section again. It can get tough in stronger currents, where you are really digging and pulling but making very slow headway.
Perhaps you are using a novel definition of kayak. I’ve rented several and Cranky Dog has come with us a few times so it’s definitely a thing that exists in the world.
Not something either of us would be likely to do. In the five or so years we’ve been renting kayaks, neither of us has ever really wanted to go alone.
Thanks for the specific recommendations. Only two dealers in the US and neither within a day’s drive of me. I appreciate the tip though.
Then that’s what we need. In fact, contrary to what i said above, I think we have rented sit on tops exclusively. The seat positions look higher in the pictures online but I’m pretty sure now we’ve been using sit on tops.
All good qualities. Thanks.
Adorable!
I’ll check out the kayak thread! I didn’t look in the game room. I wouldn’t have considered kayaking the way we do it a sport or game but I guess it counts. Thanks!
My mid-size sedan will carry the kayak strapped to the roof. If you think that is unlikely to work, I will introduce you to the 8 foot hardwood worktable also in my garage that the dude with the giant van said he couldn’t transport but which I moved in minutes on the car. The litany of heavier, bulkier things I’ve moved with the same car include a king-size mattress and box spring, commercial file cabinet (~300 lbs, 8’x3’x3’), large 6-drawer dresser, and a 10’ cherry dining table. The kayak will be nothing in comparison. It will live in the garage. Someone near me has a used kayak hoist for sale for $30 and a rooftop carrier with straps also for $30. That will do.
This is exactly what we do on our slow local river. One time, on a tidal river, we went against the current on the way out. Then, the tide was coming in as we were going back and we were fighting the current again. It was uphill, both ways!
In @scudsucker’s defense here, a kayak has been traditionally a closed deck boat as employed by the Inuit, Yup’ik, and Aleut people. No room for a dog as all the carry space is inside the boat under the deck. More recently, the term has come to mean any small boat where you face forward and paddle, to include the sit-on-tops you’re thinking of. The pedant in me doesn’t like the conflation of multiple craft under one specific word; welcome to my world of old person crankiness.
To my mind, this is a kayak:
Look at little Comok!
Let’s just say that today, in a modern kayak, most people probably don’t intend to jam a dog into the bulkhead storage space. Probably.
[zappa]Watch out where the huskies go, don’t you eat that yellow snow![/zappa]
Note that Nanook Of The North isn’t a documentary; it’s a docudrama with actors and staged scenes. 