Double Fun at the Isle of Man

This year’s Isle of Man adventure week, organized by Keirron Tastagh, proved to be an adventure with the weather – it blew nicely all weekend, and even Monday after the main weekend, which was scheduled to be the day of the first attempt of breaking my circumnavigation record was blown into the seas…only Peter Oakley foud it well worth to start, but stopped at the North tip with force 5 headwinds, and being 2 hrs behind schedule already. So my record in the Explorer is still up to be broken…Nico Middelkoop and I decided to share a NDK Triton (thanks for Keirron to borrow it to us!) and to jump into the tidal race of the Calf of man – watched by plenty of people enjoying the beautiful (windy) day out there.

Instead of racing around the Island

We started at Peel with Nico in the back seat, had a lovely 3-hrs paddle with following winds down to the Calf. After 1/2 hrs of playing in the growing surf, we swapped seats, and kept on working and playing hard! The Triton proved to be more stable in the rough surf waves than I expected, but tended to dive the bow down easy, when it had full speed driven by two strong paddlers 🙂

Waves started to develop…

I must say I do enjoy much more being in the front than in the back seat, having *no* person’s back to watch all the time and *not* to coordinate that much with the strokes, as the back seater should pay more attention to that…

It’s wet in the front!

I felt I had more freedom *pulling* someone behind me rather than pushing someone around :-)) – well, generally the back seat is considered the seat with the most "control", but I felt it different. Anyway, with both constellations we had fun playing!

Speeding up!

A single kayak would be still my first choice, but when I would be thinking about getting one to take less experienced people around areas and conditions they would not go in on their own – starting maybe with my 1-year old son again – this should be the NDK Triton! On the edge…