The next day of the family reunion was spent at a lake so the motor boat contingent of the family could spend the day water skiing. We went to the nearby San Antonio Lake and discovered that they charge $5.00 for each boat brought into the park. So a gas guzzling ski boat cost $5.00 to bring in, which everyone expected, but my human powered kayak also cost $5.00 to get in, which nobody except the ranger at the gate had expected.
I was not interested in water skiing, so I got in my kayak and paddled down the lake to a creek, called Harris Creek, and paddled up that for a while. It was a five mile an hour zone, so I didn’t expect to see many motor boats. One boat did follow me up and chase off a lot of the wildlife before I could see it. But I still saw a great blue heron, a green heron, kingfishers, red shafted flickers, acorn woodpeckers, and a several kinds of grebes. The grebes were making a lot of noise on the water and I don’t recall ever noticing that before. Perhaps it is mating season or perhaps I heard them calling before but attributed it to other birds. Farther up the creek past where a motor boat could go I started seeing turtles on the bank. Even my presence was enough to scare most of them into the water, but one turtle let me drift back and forth several times in front of it without jumping off the bank.
As the creek wound its way into the hills, the banks became steeper and made of sandstone dropping vertically into the water. This kept the water was deep enough to paddle in until the sides came together so close that my kayak would no longer fit. A few meters upstream from this was a little waterfall, so I couldn’t have paddle any farther anyway.
San Antonio Lake has traffic rules that require boats to travel in a counter clockwise direction. There are buoys running down the middle to delineate the one-way areas. From the strict way the ranger at the gate interpreted the definition of a boat, I figured that they would be sticklers for the one-way rules for me, even if I was hugging the shoreline. So just to avoid a confrontation I paddled out into the middle of the lake and went around the other side of the buoys. Scott came by in the speed boat pulling Erin (Paul’s girlfriend) on a kneeboard and turned to pass close by me. He intended to hit me with a big wake, but Erin fell off the board and he had to turn back before getting to me. I had time to paddle over and talk to them before they got under way again. Then when they did take off, I saw their wake heading my direction, managed to catch up to it, and got a little bit of a ride from it.
I took the afternoon off and left my kayak around for anyone who wanted to play with it. My sister Patty took her youngest son Nathan out for a ride. Mark went out in it several times. Jeremy, Todd, and Michael (Margie’s oldest) rough-housed with the kayak and tried to sink it. Everyone seemed to feel that it was fun having a kayak around and were glad we paid the $5.00 to get it into the lake.