Canal Island Group Trip

It's always nice when plans come together! Jon, Ali, Nate and I had been thowing around the idea of kayaking trip into the Delta for a while, particularly before Nate PCS'd out to Hawaii. Last weekend proved to be the perfect merger of a cutter maintenance period for me, a few days not on the road for Jon and Ali, and a non-flying Saturday for Nate. So, after laying in supplies for an overnight we strapped kayaks to trucks and headed for Hubbard Landing.

Our launch was slightly delayed as we had forgotten the beer at home and had to drive back to Stockton in order to pick some up. Once we were suitably loaded we hit the water and began paddling towards Canal Island platform. We stopped in Big Beaver Creek for Jon and Ali to dip the 5 Rivers Resource Center paddle before continuing to the platform. We were able to approach the platform from the northern channel; last time I was there I had to come from the south as the northern end was completely blocked by downed trees. We stopped by the platform to offload gear and pull out the map to plan the rest of the day. We elected to paddle down Little Lake until we were tired, or reached a point where we needed to turn around and head back before we lost daylight. As we came out of the south channel into Little Lake, we ran into Rob Nykvist, who pointed us towards Napp Lake where he had seen a number of small 'gators out sunning themselves. Seeing as this was probably a one-off opportunity for Nate and as everyone apparently wanted to see alligators, we revised our plan and turned north for Napp Lake. As Rob promised, we saw several small alligators that had roused themselves out of torpor to hang out on some of the sunnier logs. Nate was able to dip the paddle in Napp Lake, and once we hit the end of Napp Lake, hunger drove us back to the platform.

Canal Island platform seems to harbour a lot of fish; like the last time I was there, we could hear fish jumping all through the night. The owls were out too, and combined with a full moon, made for a really nice, if loud night. Still, we all slept well and woke up to a very cold morning. We paddled the 5 or so miles back relatively early that mornng as Jon had a flight out that night...with a following wind and current, we made very good time. At the end of the trip, we had paddled about 14miles through five named bodies of water.