We had a beautiful day for the first kayaking trip of 2018 and I was all fired to quickly get the boats loaded up and to start the day.
Roger and I decided we would get back on The Etowah River and tackle the Lake Allatoona Backwaters section as it will only get slower as the summer gets closer. With the recent opening of Canton's Etowah River Park, we decided to push the put-in two miles upstream from the riverkeeper's previously suggested start which made our eight mile season opener a 10 miler!
I noticed a path heading down to the launch, but I got a surprise when I got near the end of this little trail!!
We survived the 6-8" of mud (with a few falls and mud on a LOT more than just our feet!) and we finally pushed off.
That's Roger and Kyle on the right and you'll notice that Kyle had to use the "yellow submarine" (aptly named as it likes to go underwater!) as we had a special guest with us on my Trio 11; David!! As you can see above, and in ALL of this trip's photos, the water looked like a bottle of Yoo-hoo which is because of all the rain we had this past week. The good news for The Etowah River is that it was up quite a bit and the good news for us is that for the first half of the trip we had a nice current pulling us towards Lake Allatoona.
The park had a nice pedestrian bridge connecting trails on both sides of the river and they made sure you knew what city you were in!!
And yes... more Yoo-hoo as this is mostly what we saw on this relaxing trip down the river. Maybe it isn't beautiful to everyone, but to me it is magical.
As for wildlife, I only saw one turtle the whole day and we had a trio of birds of prey above us a one point – I was just too slow (or lazy!) to get me camera ready. There was some debate as to if they were hawks or buzzards. 
Either way, they were pretty soaring above us. We also run under a TON of purple martins and I was only able to snap off this photo. You will have to click on it to get the full-resolution to see anything.
We were also treated to a single blue heron today.
As with the picture above, you can click on the ones below to see the full-resolution images. These next two are my attempts to capture it flying.
Since this was David's first outing with us, I'm "honoring" him with a couple of pictures in my (exciting) blog post! Thanks for coming out with us, David!!
As you can see in that last picture, the river got very wide (and still) as we approached the beginning of the Allatoona Lake. After about 3.5 hours on this 10 mile trip we were past Knox Bridge.
Then it was short paddle up to the boat ramp where we shuffled our cars to earlier in the day.
This is the same spot Gretchen and I visited recently when we were Powering Through the Lake Allatoona Section of the Etowah River. This trip marks the half-way point of traveling on this river as I have now completed 8 of the 16 sections documented on the Etowah River Water Trail. I'm so looking forward to cover the second half, too!
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