Today was another day of rest spent out of the kayak. Notice I said - out of the kayak - not off the water. I did manage to end up joining Ken from Bay Creek Kayak on a stand up paddleboard for a quick run up the river behind the store. Besides playing around on the boards I took advantage of a bit of civilization to tune up the Ikkuma. I’d managed to tweak the skeg wire a bit but a few minutes of fussing (and some super glue to stiffen it) got it straightened out and almost as good as new. Hanging around at the kayak store made me home sick for Aqua Adventures. Like I said in an earlier post, it’s a great shop staffed by real kayakers who care. On this night they were running the weekly time trial race on the river behind the store. Finish times are carefully kept by Ken, with the most competition coming from the paddlers against their old best times. The “race” is followed by grilled hot dogs and beer served by the Bay Creek staff.
The rest of my day was spent still trying to hunt down maps for the western half of Lake Erie. Even the local West Marine didn’t have quite what I was looking for. I do have most of the eastern end of the lake covered so my plan now is to check stores further west with hopes that as I get closer to the lake stores might have charts for it. Surprisingly a Michigan state atlas was not hard to find and I spent a couple hours in the morning tearing out the pages I need (which is a lot with Michigan’s long coast line), now I just have to get there.