Kayak fishing expedition gear dilemmas

It's really pretty easy to go kayak camping overnight but the longer one is out there and the more they are on the move the more complicated it becomes. Storage, weight and management all become issues. Real estate is premium on your kayak for longer trips and the further one intends to go, the more every gram counts. Not just because of on-water performance, but equally so for ease of management. If you've never tried it, take it from someone who knows - hauling ones kayak up a long beach when it's full of expedition gear is hard work, especially after a big day on the water. Done day after day it becomes a serious burden on your back.

Hauling a fully loaded expedition fishing kayak up a long beach is a good place to start with my current dilemmas on gear selection for my 1000km kayak fishing expedition. When the going is good, a wheelcart is not required to haul a heavy kayak up a beach - sliding it up on it's hull is perfectly acceptable on most beaches. The problem here is that Adventure Island's are ultra-heavy by kayak standards, especially loaded with fishing, video, food, water and camping gear. We get away with each time we go to Fraser without using wheelcarts. It's handy to have someone nearby to help drag the yaks up. I won't have that luxury.   

Nor do I have the luxury of being guaranteed an accommodating beach. In fact it's most likely that I will be landing at most places at the lower stage of tides, meaning I will be having to haul my kayak a good distance to get clear of the massive tides. I'm not even guaranteed of a beach... some of my potential landing spots are coffee rock flats: no-drag-kayak zones. While I'd rather not carry the extra weight of a wheelcart (the obvious way around this dilemma) it looks as if I'm going to have to. And it's taken several experiments to come up with a cart configuration that makes the most sense. In the end I settled on Hobie Trax 2 beach sand wheels on a Trax 1 style frame. It stores better on the AI (with my gear bags in rear storage well) than the newer frame, and weighs less.   

I have also toiled over the dilemma of whether or not to carry an anchor. I know that the safe thing to do is to carry one... kind of. I'd have to use a 1.5kg anchor minimum in those currents and there's no guarantee I'd ever need to use it... making it a lot of weight to carry for probably naught. Still, if I find myself overpowered in a stiff current (with no wind) and can only otherwise progress in the opposite tide flow, having an anchor to throw down so I can rest without being pushed backwards would be really very handy. No matter how I cut it, I'm going to have to carry one, even though I can't remember the last time I actually needed one.   

I did spend a lot of time debating whether or not to mount and use a sounder and in the end my decision was made easy, thanks to HobieCat Australia, who were kind enough to lend me a Gold Navionics Charts card, which fits both my Lowrance Out&Back handheld GPS (primary navigation device) and Lowrance Elite 5 sounder/chartplotter. Having the chartplotter as a backup navigation device is a handy thing to have and that I can transfer the card from one (if it or its battery fails) to the other is a modular godsend. Of course, this will give me depth reading capabilities as well, which will be handy at times... especially if I do start thinking about anchoring up!

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