February 22, 2004

When Blood Turns Cold

I take a few more pictures and put the camera away. I need to remember to upload these and the few I took last weekend at Leesylvania up to the web server.

The wind has been building since I pulled up, and it would have been so easy just to load the kayak back up and go home. My dry-suit grows tighter on each passing day, and the new neck gasket was already feeling quite uncomfortable. Sigh...Well I've come this far I might as well go on.

I launched through some small wavelets. The fetch was small but the water dark with small debris and my bright orange sea kayak looked like it had taken a mud bath by the time I got away from shore and fastened my spray-skirt.

I turned the kayak north and headed wards Kanes Creek. I was winded, partly from the tight neck gasket, partly from the effort it took to launch. Another inconvenience I noticed that would grow through the trip was a lack of back support. I kept sliding down in the seat and it was fatiguing to keep pressing back against the foot pegs. I felt like I could just slide on in all the way up to the forward bulkhead.

High tide had been an hour earlier, so I had plenty of water back in the creek to paddle in. In the summer, the lilly pads mark the edges of the channel. But in winter it is easy to glide over a shallow area and become grounded in the silty mud. For the most part for now, there seems to be enough water to float me directly across the shallows. With the wind at my back, I used my paddle blades as a sail to carry me deep into the creek.

A few places I could feel my skeg drag bottom as I passed over shallow areas. I knew I'd need to follow the channel on the way out. Having reached the back of the creek I turned the kayak around and was greeted to the cold blast that had been at my back on the way in.

I swayed from side to side in the creek following the channel. The wind was biting, but the water was flat until I got back out to the mouth. Here, the waves were short and steep and my bow buried in them as I cut a path back into Occoquan Bay, and in short order arrived back at the launch.

As I hopped out of the kayak I pulled it clear of the water, tossed my gloves into the cockpit and took a much needed stretch. After dropping my paddle in the grass I shouldered the kayak and placed it on the grass too. In the short time since I had landed my hands had become bitterly cold so I quickly grabbed a few dry bags and my paddle and walked the 100 yards back to the car.

As I reached to unlock the car I see my hand is covered in red. It took me a few moments of looking at the bright red liquid to realize it was my blood. Dripping off the ends of my fingers I felt no pain, and had a hard time convincing myself it was really blood. The bright red color looked almost orange through my sunglasses.

I had a roll of paper towels in the car so I took one and tightly wrapped several fingers. As luck would have it I had carried up the first aid kit in one of the dry bags. After dabbing up the blood from my fingers I'm finally able to tell I had just scraped the skin off my pinky from my second knuckle all the way up to the fingernail. It sure looked painful but unworthy of all the blood that seemed to gush from it. I cleaned up the finger and put a band aide over it but it kept seeping enough that I had to wrap another paper towel over it while I loaded up the rest of my gear.

Back at the kayak I can see blood around the cockpit. How did I not see this before? I must have scraped it as I carried it back up the grass. I'll have something different to mention in the trip report... I cleaned up my wound and tossed the kayak on top of the car, took one last look around and headed for home.