fusioneng wrote:
Those mud trails remind me of a problem we always have.
There are a gazzilian sea birds around here called komarants (not spelled correctly I’m sure). They love Hobie kayaks and hunt us down, They know the mirage drives stir up the bottom and dive under the boat to catch fish.
We have had at times a half dozen of them swimming under and around the boat. We don’t see that so much with regular kayaks or powerboats. It’s like they recognize us, and don’t appear to have any fear of us.
Therein lies the problem, when the water is very shallow there isn’t enough room under the boat, many times I have to stop pedaling in fear of hurting the birds diving under the boat.
I swear when they come to the surface with a fish they are showing it to me. The birds have long skinny necks and we often see the bulge from a 2-3” long fish halfway down the birds necks, ( I have no idea how they do it).
Most of the islands and mangroves around here are also bird sancuaries, and there are miles and miles of backwaters, however quite a bit of it is only 8-10” deep at low tide, when shallow pedaling we leave those exact mud trails.
Many of those lakes are only accessible by kayak thru mangrove tunnels, so no powerboats.
We like it that way.
Just a funny story about shallow pedaling, lol all the newbies pull their mirage drives.
FE
Oh, believe me, they come after the regular kayaks too. They hang around and go after the small fry you release. Since we catch and release everything they can be a real nuisance. I saw one get a trout that I had just released. I thought it was going to choke on it. It was a pretty good sized fish, but that bird got it down.