Kayak on Klip River

After the excitement we had last time on the Kip river See (Too much of a good thing) It was decided that more time will be spent on scouting out the route to prevent us from spending too much time in the water. Gert and I used Google Earth to measure the distance we wanted to go and this time it came to 15.43 km which is much more respectable for a leisurely Saturday cruse.

We arrived at 9h30 at the launch spot and asked at the neighboring houses if we could leave the cars in their yards. In the mean time Gert phoned and told us they bring along two more guys too and they are on their way to leave one of their cars at the end our river journey. The previous time we saw a caravan park and picked it to be our end point. To Gert's surprise the caravan park was deserted, gates locked and nobody to be seen. A small problem because this is now the planned end point, fortunately he found a friendly guy in the street busy mowing his lawn. Gert struck up a conversation and the guy and he borrowed Gert his gate key. The caravan park is between the river and the back of his property, looks like everyone in the street has a key for accessing the back of their yards.

Eventually we launched and Sybie and Morné joint us on their wave boards. There are a couple of differences to our kayaks. We sit inside, they sit on top. We have a lot of space to pack tents and food and beer, they can bring along an apple and a bottle of water. Their boards are wider than the kayak, so sometimes we crossed obstacles a bit faster. Their boards are on top of the water so they turn much faster than we could. At the end of the day it does not matter for what we did the day.

This was the first time all of us went kayaking after the notorious killer rapid. Too be honest I wasn't in a hurry to go down the first rapid we came across. It looked like nobody wanted to go down the rapid. Eventually all of us made it through.

The next bigger rapid we crossed a tree trunk was placed nearly in the middle of the rapid and Sybie was unfortunate to make contact with it. Ursula was also swimming and bumped her knee again. After fishing everyone out on the riverbank we took a break for a byte. Sybie took quite some time out to recover from his injury while Dalené tried to help.

There was definitely more water in the river, and more tree trunks was in our way, looks like there was a lot of water down the river since the last time we saw it. The water was very muddy and it is better not to think too much of what may be lurking beneath.

Dalené was still trying to come to grips with her engagement ring.

Eventually we came to our deserted caravan park and the last rapid of the day. It was so nice Gert and I just had to do it a couple of times, for the experience….ok both of us wanted a white water picture.

When we tried to get out of the caravan park Gert realized that he left the borrowed key in his car, where he began our trip. Now they had to find a second person willing to borrow his key!

Eventually everything was sorted out with the cars and the equipment and we even had time to braai a nice big fillet steak.

What a day! More photos here