Well, last October some friends and I put the AI's through a buffet of coastal conditions as a 'test-case', since I am starting a guiding and rental service in the area (my hometown of Port O'Connor near the Matagorda Island Nature Preserve) where we had our adventure .
I must say these boats performed beyond all our expectations. We had a lot of dolphin company as shown by the video below:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhTkC_6Zg68[/youtube]
Full blog and article is here:
http://www.dolphinkayak.net/blog.htmlMy friends are four Filipino's from Odessa, TX, and we all met in Port O'Connor, TX; this trailer was jack-knifing a turn into the RV park and blocking the road at 3 am in the morning!
Since there was a cold front en-route we decided to break the expedition up, day 1 - sail to island during the day and back at night before the cold front hit, day 2 - sail to the island and camp after the cold front hit, day 3 - sail home.
They made some wooden benches with grooves to bungee onto the aka's - this allowed use to put ice chests on top of that - it worked out well. These guys were putting ice chests full of steak, watermelons, mangos, pineapples, more steak etc.
We arrived at the 'J-Hook' (a point on Matagorda Island) and proceeded to grill, fish, and watch the dolphins who hang out a few feet from the bank.
And a fast sail at sunset back to Port O'Connor before the norther' hit! It was wet, wild, fast, and fun.
We slept in town while the north wind howled, and then went the 'back way' back to the island to Sunday Beach where I did a little crabbing with a drum-stick.
We setup camp right!
The next morning we heated up the soup and had some sardines, oddly the coyotes (which were there as tracks were everywhere) didn't disturb anything, but even in South Texas it can be chilly in the fall.
All the pics and video were done by this guy - Alan ApTorre.
It was hard to capture dolphins with still pics, so look at the videos for them.
We are planning to do this again many times, and we plan to be involved in the Texas 200 Regatta (which is more like 250 miles this year).
Hope you enjoy! -Alan R.