I got out paddling this month.... in Florida!
Since our water is pretty hard at the moment, I went south to paddle. Way south, about 2,300 km farther south than I had ever paddled before. Our family took advantage of a WestJet seat sale and flew to Orlando for the first week of December. The first 4 days were spent at the usual Disney World and other theme parks - lots of people (although in reality it was a low traffic time and there were not nearly as many people as there might have been) and a few watery rides didn't quite cut it for me.
The last part of our trip was spent at the ocean, at Cocoa Beach. Living so far from saltwater I knew I wanted to take advantage of the warm ocean so in advance I had lined up an ACA kayak instructor to spend an afternoon working on my ocean paddling skills. I hired Michael Shugg who just recently formed Adventure Spirit Kayaking -
http://www.adventurespiritkayaking.com/ and we headed out from Port Canaveral on a beautiful afternoon to play in the waves of Cocoa Beach learning to tour and play in a bit of surf. The waves weren't big, but they were enough to work with as a start.
Here is the full story on my blog:
http://pawistik.blogspot.ca/2013/12/win ... art-1.html


Cheers,
Bryan