El Residente
26 An Title Adventure article in Paradise by Lee Swidler
Kayaking the Río San Juan; The Trip of a Lifetime Part 2 The following recounts the author’s trip traversing the Rio San Juan (which constitutes the border between Costa Rica and Nicaragua) with his son and some friends. Part 2 begins on day three as the four men enter the river in their inflatable kayaks, each towing a second kayak with food and supplies, for the first time.
F
or the first time since becoming a dad, I found myself in the position of being the weaker link, and sat in the front in our kayak, allowing my son to do the paddling in the rear. My friend Bob and his boy followed the same arrangement. Who were we going to fool; the younger men were obviously going to pull the major part of the weight, so we may as well have accepted reality. I finally felt my 60 years of age. Within five minutes we were looking for a place to pull off. The kayaks were sitting way too low; Bob was practically lying down backward for lack of back support, and in the rear Cody and Dave barely had their butts out of the water. My old friend Neil, who owns Kayak Jacó and had lent me the kayaks, had advised
me we should not over-inflate them because the hot sun could cause the tubes to expand more and blow out. Apparently we had taken that advice too literally; the boats definitely needed more air. We found a safe place to stop, which fortunately was just out of the view of the unwilling-to-wave Castillians.
A short time later we got back on the river, feeling a bit better. Bob and Dave, however, still had no back support and the boats were still sitting low. We pushed on for an hour or so before being forced to pull over again to figure a way to keep the back supports full of air and to get the boats to sit higher in the water. Bob broke out some five-minute epoxy, the 21st century duct tape, and true to its name, the stuff worked; after just ten minutes
