BootsnAll's Travel Community

Does anyone have any experience with long distance sea kayaking?
I'm curious about following coastlines....for instance, down the coast of Thailand and malaysia would seem to be a pleasant trip with plentiful places to stop and camp or bungalow... relatively calm waters too(?)
I've done some kayaking in the Sea of Cortez, Baja California and I'm trying to figure out what other places would be feasible.
Any leads on other websites that might have more info on this sort of thing would be appreciated to get my imagination going.
Thanks, K

Closer to home, there is:

- Maine Coastal Trail
- Inside Passage

If you're a little bolder, there is always things like

- circumnavigating Greenland
- circumnavigating Tasmania

I haven't really spent any time there, but you can check out the forum at:

http://www.kayakforum.com

I'd also peruse Sea Kayaker magazine. They have trip reports about long distance touring quite frequently.

And, if you find out any more sources let me know.

Don't know exactly how this would affect a kayaker, but I've read that there are a lot of pirates around Malaysia, especially in the Malacca Strait. These are machine-gun toting murderers, not ho-ho-and a bottle of rum types. They usually attack at night, but you can be in trouble any time of day. I know they attack boats of all sizes, so that might be a risk.

I haven't done it myself but know of a few places that would be great to paddle around in Australia. Firstly, and one that most people will recognise, is the Whitsundays - should be very do-able. The other - and one that I'm very interested in doing - is to Kayak from Hinchinbrook Island up to Cairns, island hopping the whole way. I've been through the area a hundred times on the ship I was working on and have always wondered about doing it by Kayak and taking a few weeks to do it, no hurry.

I suppose if that was your gig then you would probably also like places like Vanuatu, New Caledonia and the Solomon Islands.... oooh the Solomons, Lagoon central!! Now we're cooking! They have the biggest lagoons there. Also things have settled right down over there so it's business as usual.

At least these places don't have pirates. As soon as you start getting close to Indonesia or the Phillipines you have to start worrying about them all around SE Asia.

So many things to do, so little time!!

You should check out Paul Theroux's The Happy Isles of Oceania. He brings a collapsible kayak with him and visits the Pacific Islands, NZ and OZ. It's a great book.

New Zealand has some good kayaking spots.
Auckland (main city) has the Hauraki Gulf which contains many islands/beaches.
Then there's the Bay of Islands further north with its "Hole in the rock" (a small offshore rocky island that you can paddle through a natural 'tunnel') etc.
I've kayaked from Auckland to Tauranga (five days) which was an interesting trip - crossing the Firth of Thames via Waiheke Island and around Cape Colville and then down the coast to Tauranga via Bowentown Heads.
Then there's the Marlborough Sounds in the South Island.
Plenty of choices really - you'd just have to pick your weather.

Alaska seems perfect for the purpose as well, at least during the summer of course, there are routes around and between islands, I haven't been there but read about it, you can start checking it out from kayaking in Alaska here and follow the links

I haven't done much kayaking at all, but a friend of mine is seriously into it and planning a long-distance trip around Long Island this summer -- read about it here. Erik loves talking about kayaking, so if you want to contact him about it, send me a PM.

Travel to and in Hawaii is expensive but the Na Pali coast on the island of Kauai is one of the best paddles in the world.

We did part of Prince William Sound (Valdez to Whitter) in AK following the coast and that was one of the best travels in any mode we've done. Incredible sea life and scenery. It's hard to find another place like that where you can make coffee with glacier melt, collect berries for breakfast, and catch salmon for dinner while having companies with otters and sea lions almost all the times. That is though, you won't mind the nearly constant rain. So a good radio is essential and maps of course.

We used folding kayaks from Feathercraft and found them quite convenient. At the end of our trip, we just folded it into a backpack and carried onto the ferry.

"Rowing to Latitude" is a great book with lots of stories on rowing/kayaking all around the far north.