Today was a pretty long day. We set an alarm for 8 o'clock this morning, thinking we could get a good start. Somehow it took us 2.5 hours to repack our camping stuff so we got off to a late start for what we had planned for today. We had to make it to George Andrews dam by 4:30 or else we would be carrying the fully loaded kayaks about a half mile around the dam. This was enough incentive to make us paddle the 14 miles quickly. However, we stopped a little bit too long to talk to our worried mothers (who were waiting at a boat ramp along the way to see if we needed anything else) and to eat lunch, so we ended up having to sprint the last 7 or so miles to the dam. We made it just in time, as the lock doors swung open for us at 4:15. I was able to film a cool time lapse shot of the lock lowering us down- I hope it turns out alright. We decided to take a good long break after the dam. After we had regained some strength, we leisurely paddled until about 6:00 when we decided to start looking for campsites. We started to get a little nervous when some of the beaches we had looked at on google earth turned out to be very steep and rocky and it was getting late. We even found one beach that would have worked if we hadn't seen a sign that said something like "no trespassing- violators will be confronted with force and may risk serious injury or death." Needless to say we decided that we would try and find another spot.
About 5 miles past the dam, we found a great beach where I am currently typing this blog. It is about 20 feet up from the water and we can see two ways down the river. We ended up going right at 20 'map miles'. My arms are definitely feeling it right now. We estimated that we took around 18,500 paddle strokes today.
We didn't see as much wildlife today, but we still saw a couple gators, snakes and plenty of birds.
Tomorrow we are planning on going 17.5 miles to our next campsite.
Please share some of the pics along the way so we can keep up with what you're doing ;o) ox
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