Sea Kayaking in Greece: Bring a Sail

Greece is a popular sea kayaking vacation destination. With good reason. The island chains are intricate and unspoiled. The water is warm, the cost of living is low. And it's a fine place to try sailing a sea kayaking for the first time.

Most sea kayaks equipped with a sail use a mast and self-stayed sail. Bring a sea kayak sail to Greece, with its consistent winds, and you'll truly rip along from island to island. Sea kayaks equipped with sails usually include a rudder. The sea kayaker uses low brace leans and the occasional bow rudder to control and steer the kayak.

The video was taken in near gale force winds (25 knots, or what's referred to as afresh breeze), during a fast downwind leg off Milos Island, Greece. Note the sea kayaker's use of a port bow rudder. As you watch video you might wondered from time to time what it would be like to roll a sea kayak with a sail on the foredeck.

Milos Island lies off Greece on the Aegean Sea. The island is part of Cyclades, an island group southeast of the mainland of Greece and about nautical miles from Piraeus, about halfway to Crete.

One of the issues with sailing a sea kayak is discomfort. The discomfort issue is not so obvious. The surest way to develop some pretty good back and leg pain, or worse sciatica, is to sit motionless in your kayak for too long.

The reasons are numerous. All of the sitting pressure we ordinarily transform into torque to propel the sea kayak by paddling from the core clots, inert, in the lower back and lumbar. We lose the alternating foot pressure we create against footpegs that ordinarily add power to our stroke. It all gets subsumed within the lower back, hips, and lumbar.

Most sea kayaking sails have masts: think of making a peace sign with your index and middle finger inside a sandwich bag but are self-stayed (don't require stays held by the paddler or the paddle).

The sail is tall and narrow, has a clear window, and propels the kayak along at a fast clip. The sail has important distinctions from other sea kayak sails, not all of them as obvious as the differences in the sails' sizes, shapes, and height from deck.

Finally we lose the lower body mobility when we shift weight and use knee-hangs against the inside of the foredeck for control and balance -- that improvised dance of weight shifts, knee pressure changes, leans we use to keep a sea kayak upright.

So sail a kayak and a couple of things happen. You blast downwind at speeds that easily top out your kayak's hull speed, typically speeds it will attain if surfing.

Second, you do what you can to steer the kayak with a rudder or any number of braces, leans, and rudder moves bow and stern. But essentially you sit locked in cement in the too small bathtub that is your cockpit. But boy do you go fast.

Which brings up a sail's utility for the solo paddler. Sailing your kayak turns it into a new type of boat. On long journeys where you need to make mileage, a large increase in average speed can do wonders for your dailies. Should you be injured, ill, or under pressure to accomplish other tasks while keeping moving (resting, running a vhf radio or satellite phone), you continue making miles.

But the bottom line is that sailing a kayak can make us better paddlers with higher levels of sea skills. The nuances of wind -- its shifts in direction, speed, gustiness, or tendency to shift during certain seasons and times of day -- that are all too often lost on kayakers for whom kayaking marks their first exposure to the maritime environment.

If we learn to sail our kayaks, we developt that many more sea kayaking skills. By learning to sail a kayak we learn and know that much more about the force -- the wind -- which more than anything affects the type of day we'll have.

To read more about sea kayaking, see the online resources Sea Kayaking Dot Net and NorthAmerican Kayak Fishing.