Newnan's Lake - The Middle

The neighborhood cat pisses on my kayak at night. I don't blame her: it is big, blue and sits right in the middle of her territory. The problem is I don't realize it until I put in and the water "re-activates" the piss and then the smell is with me for the duration. Turns out it was perfect potpourri for what was a nasty outing.

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Nasty isn't always bad. For instance, I loved the nastiness of the choppy, Gatorade-green water and the spray that soaked me. Hell, I even liked the nasty vertigo I felt when I closed my eyes and tried to float. I did not, however, like the nasty 40oz bottles, or the cigarette boxes, or the sandwich wrappers, or the fishing tackle bags that always grace any part of the west shore of Newnan's where it opens up to the road. I am tempted to make a laminated sign or something to tell them to clean their shit up, but what good would it do? If people enjoy sitting in trash when they fish, who am I to stop them?

I was determined to get to the geographical middle of the lake and float, and I kinda did. The getting to the middle was no problem, but the floating was. When I leave it in charge of things, my boat likes to orient itself so that it takes the waves broadside and, since some of the waves were taller than the out-of-the-water part of my boat, I got soaked. This was clearly not going to be a meditative outing.


No matter, I would just sit here and welcome any of the three storms approaching Newnan's, just like my hero John Muir did when he lashed himself to the top of a tree during a thunderstorm. I mean, it's not at all insane to be the tallest thing in a 7,500 acre lake during a thunder and lightning, right? But all the storms stayed around the edge of the lake, so I waited for the Gainesville Area Rowers to slide past during their practice before I pointed my boat to shore and paddled in.

Whenever I am on this side of Newnan's, I use the lily pads as a landmark (watermark?) to get back, except this time the wind had blown them all together, so that at one point I was paddling through nothing but lily pads. I pretty sure it is not okay to do this ecologically, but I had to get through them. Lily pads, please accept my apology. For penance, I will bring a trash bag next time I come back.