I think we're going to need a bigger boat.
My son thought I was crazy when I sent him some pictures of a 14' kayak that I had rigged up with a Torqueedo trolling motor. It was a fire engine red kayak that I also decided to wrap in a camouflage decal from an outfit down in Georgia.
To me, it was an extraordinary feat of engineering. It was extremely fast, which I enjoyed, motorized with a German Torqueedo motor which was able to flip up and out the way when encountering an obstacle (saving me and my motor dozens of times). Unfortunately, a typical experience was similar to one on the Ipswich River Wildlife Refuge in Topsfield, MA one morning.
I can clearly remember the frustration of trying to navigate a mid-Spring floodplain where a meandering river overtakes surrounding vegetation to become an unnavigable morass, with snags in every direction and river identity blurring into brush. I encountered dozens of obstacles every step of the way that day. Fortunately, I at least captured some of my favorite images of a Wood Duck pair on high alert up in a tree, and of a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers both working a tree like a chain gang.
However, the frustration of dealing with a motor on the tail end of an at-best unstable kayak was a dealbreaker. Can you imagine, trying to tip back on that kind of kayak to untangle the prop from yet another snag? Never again.
For me, a worse fate quickly became being locked in that plastic cockpit for more than about an hour. My back, and my legs, and eventually, my shoulders would start to ache in an excruciating way at about the two-hour mark. I spent a couple of years trying to find a remedy to the misery of kayaking. Never again.
Things have come a long way since then. Just look at how pleasant a
motorized kayaking trip to Scarborough Beach was a few days ago. Coming up is a trip to the Brownfield Bog!