Boats

If you go online, you can find a good deal of kayak snobbery. If you are going fishing in the ocean, or white-water, then yes, you could justify a better boat. But if you are just going on calm inland water, you really can't beat Lifetime boats for price, handling, and features. And they are indestructible. Lifetime also makes Emotion kayaks.

One more note: if you are going inland, then yellow is a great color for a kayak - it makes you easy to see and hopefully harder to run over by drunken motorboats. But if you are going in the ocean, yellow has a major drawback: Sharks are fascinated by yellow. In World War II, the Navy found out that yellow life jackets were a very bad idea. Online, you can find multiple videos of sharks harassing kayaks, and in every case it is a yellow hull. I even have personal experience: Once on a dive I got into a school of spiny dogfish, and they took turns trying to steal any yellow gear I had. Fortunately, dogfish are small and harmless, and the whole thing was kind of comical.




Paddlin' in the Pines
( 39.72215, -74.42738 )

  1. Batsto Lake - Batsto ( 39.64682, -74.65327 )
  2. Batsto River - Wharton State Forest ( 39.71014, -74.66747 )
  3. Cedar Creek - Berkeley ( 39.90248, -74.24513 )
  4. Cedar Creek - Lanoka Harbor ( 39.86936, -74.17065 )
  5. Great Egg Harbor River - Penny Pot ( 39.57547, -74.82239 )
  6. Great Egg Harbor River - Weymouth ( 39.51339, -74.77889 )

This map shows the trips described in this article.
Hover over marker for name.

by Andrée Jannette

New Jersey Outdoors
Spring 1998
$4.25

If you don't know how to turn your canoe on a dime when you put in at your first Pinelands river, you will by the time you finish. These are narrow, winding rivers, full of sweeping curves and sharply angled switchbacks. Yet these twists and turns are very much a part of the mystique and the delight of paddling in New Jersey's Pinelands.

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