First trip – Julington Creek from Mandarin Park
Our inaugural paddle! Just installed the Yakima Sweet Roll cradles on my Pathfinder roof rack and managed to get my boat up there. The Cuda 12 weighs in at 70 lbs w/o the seat and that’s a lot of plastic to be pushing on the roof of a car. As much of a challenge is getting it down…and it does slide down fast when you get it going. We managed to put in at the Mandarin Park boat ramp and didn’t realize that on a windy day the river really kicks up some waves and makes it tough to paddle. We made it to the Julington Creek Bridge (about 300 yards!) and then turned around and went west for a bit. The waves were really tossing us around and we ended up working HARD trying to get these big wide fishing yaks back to the ramp. What a workout, not going to do that again. So much for the first ride…it was short.