Theory of flocking

Kayakers exhibit flocking behaviour, what a great sight.

Flocking refers to the collective motion of a large number of individuals and is a collective animal behaviour exhibited by many living things like birds and fish. Birds flock together for a number of reasons. I think one reason is to confuse preditors - so many targets that its hard to focus on one.

On Friday past, 89 paddlers from all over Newfoundland flocked to Splash -N- Putt waterpark cabins for our annual kayakers Retreat. The Retreat kicked off with registration from 7:30 to 10:30 and icebreaker social hosted by The Outfitters. Volunteer Phyllis and myself were busy with registration and missed out on the icebreaker but there's always overhead to a successful event.

Saturday there were 2 groups of paddlers. One group of about 50 paddlers had a shorter paddle to ease themselves into the paddling season. I was in the second group of 22 paddlers who wanted a bit more of a workout. We had a great day on the water and after cleaning up we had a dance (music by DJ Justice Malcolm) but not a lot got up to dance. No big deal, we were here to paddle anyway.

There's a saying "birds of the feather flock together". One a year its great to get the flock together, meet new paddlers and start new friendships based on a common interest.

Tony :-)

Here we were putting in at Salton's Wharf in Terra Nova Park in Newfoundland.

Paddler Tony Lee. Tony has one of the best Newfoundland paddling websites at www.kayaktherock.com and has taken pictures of me on many occasions. But, of course, very few pictures of himself. I hadn't paddled with Tony since I bought my Olympus waterproof camera so this time I told him I was turning the table on him and putting him on my blog. Obviously having a good time.

We left Salton's Brook and paddled west down Newman's Sound with a bit of a breeze blowing from the southwest. There was a small inlet here where we found we were protected from the wind.

Derrick with his "stick" (Greenland paddle). Derrick seems to be using his GP exclusively now and says that he thinks he gets more purchase with the GP than the Euro blade.

More flocking paddlers *lol*

We stopped for lunch at South Broad Cove. There's a back-country trail that goes by here with something like 6 wilderness campsites. There are structures to tie camp food up high out of the reach of bears. Craig went looking for a restroom that Neil said was nearby but found instead a black bear. He came back unflustered so we went back to where he saw the bear but it was gone.

Here the paddling got pretty tough as the paddlers had to paddle through the rocks!

The group got spread out a bit and stopped here to re-flock.

We encountered an immature seal on our paddle back to Salton's. I stopped paddling and the seal approached my kayak. It was as curious about what I was and I was pleased to have it stay around for a couple of minutes. At one point it swam under the kayak and I could feel it bump the hull of my boat.