Kayaking The Great South Bay/Fire Island (Part II) and Jones Beach Island
As I wrote earlier, I'm part of a group which is doing a multi-year circumnavigation of Long Island. I missed Year 1 of the trip, and have been working through the parts I missed. On Thursday, August 11th, I made up the remaining part of the route along the north side of Fire Island:
The weather was great--warm and dry, and I had the headwind on the way out, which led to a tail wind coming back. I put in after high tide, and stopped for my first break at a cool little island:
Here's the same little channel on the way back near low tide:
I talked to this commercial clammer on the way out:
He was still at it when I paddled back, some six hours later! Very nice guy, he was very interested in clamming sustainably.
I made it to Barrett Beach/Talisman, my target!
There was a commercial fisherman offshore:
The out and back paddle was about 22 miles.
This past Wednesday, John W and I paddled the distance from Captree State Park back to Jones Beach Field 10 (both are legal kayak launch spots, although we had to argue this point at the Captree entrance gate):
We timed the tides pretty well but had some surprisingly strong flood current at this bridge near Captree:
Passed by some cool summer houses accessible only by boat:
I got as close as I could to the Jones Beach Theatre, where Journey was playing (I saw Journey in 1978) (that's a chain in the foreground):
It was a great day overall, and a little navigation error coming back from the bay where the theatre was (see the loop in the GPS track) put the mileage at about 19 miles.
