Kayaking seemed like a great idea from my air-conditioned office at The News-Press bureau in Bonita Springs. I looked up guides and figured I had no business being on the water by myself.
I can swim and I'm even a certified diver but just the thought of me on a tiny kayak on the open waters of the Cocohatchee River and Wiggins Pass Estuary seemed crazy, especially because I have no sense of direction.
But, I did have enough sense to enlist the help of Connie Langmann, from GAEA guides, a kayaking company that takes people on guided kayak nature tours.
I met Langmann at 10 a.m. at the shopping plaza on Bonita Beach Road and U.S. 41. She stepped out of a white van that had a trailer of colorful kayaks hitched to it. She seemed like a woman who had seen a thing or two on the kayaking waterway.
I felt confident she could show me the ropes, or paddle, since I'd been kayaking only once as a kid and was more frightened of getting attacked by an alligator than I was of drowning.
Before heading off to the river, I met 24-year-old Kelly Hanlon and her sister Natalie, 18, of Minnesota. Like me, they wanted a sense of adventure, but we didn't exactly get what we bargained for or, should I say, prepared for.
We headed to the Cocohatchee river and unloaded the 70-pound kayaks off Langmann's trailer and into the water. Safety concerns put us in bright orange life vests with uncomfortable straps but solid padding.
The sisters tugged on the life vests as one of the kayaks nearly sailed out into the river on it's own. Langmann hollered and that's where I learned she was much tougher than I gave her credit for.
Finally we set sail.
At that moment I realized my time spent typing and making phone calls at my desk hadn't prepared me for hours of painstaking paddling against the winds.
The Hanlon sisters, who were fair like porcelain dolls when we first left the dock, grew increasingly red, but not from the glaring sun.
It was the paddling. We paddled. And paddled.
And just as the sisters and I took a break to see the lightning bolt shell Langmann took out of the water or watch the birds' nests, Langmann was off again paddling lightly and always seeming to leave us behind.
We struggled silently to keep up, and the paddling continued.
My arms were burning, and the sisters quietly looked at each other with regretful faces.
We wondered how much time was left in our tour despite all the useful information Langmann told us about the birds, mangroves and Calusa Indians.
Two hours later and 4 miles of paddling behind us, we saw land!
Luckily, I didn't drown and I didn't even see a gator. The closest I came to a reptile was a lizard near a tree when I parked my car just in time to hop on a kayak, which I would later describe as "the little boat with no motor."
Despite never thinking that I would be huffing and puffing my way through wind and water on my kayak, I learned a valuable lesson from Langmann.
Actually a few lessons:
• Never go kayaking without having spent six months working out your arms at the gym.
• Never go paddling unless you can keep up with your guide.
• Never underestimate the power of the mind and body under stress.
No matter how much I was suffering during paddling and trying to keep up, there are worse things in life ... alligators and drowning.
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