When kayaking in windy conditions, your kayak acts like a big, long weather vane. It can be difficult with some boats to head into the wind, but if the boat is improperly loaded it can become downright impossible. Or so we learned last week. Luckily it wasn't blowing hard enough to cause real problems. Here's the situation: we had loaded my wife's boat with a few day necessities (like a beach chair ) and our lunch, which was in a collapsible cooler. What we did wrong was load the gear too high and we did not balance it properly fore and aft. The result was that her bow was ever so slightly higher than normal and her profile was too high astern. It was high enough, combined with the uneven weight distribution, to give her significant fits in the wind that day.

We ended up having to move some of her gear to my boat halfway across the bay. It would have been much easier to have loaded it properly in the first place. Lesson learned. From now on, we will double check our load distribution and profile.