Please share your WW stories!

[Daniel Madrigal]

With my trip coming up quickly at less than 3 months away, I would like everyone who has done the trip to post a couple of their top memories, experiences, or things to do along the way. 

[28yfu6tdnoxk4]

I've paddled the entire 99-mile wilderness waterway three times solo, from Choko down to Flamingo. My first trip, back in the 70s, was in December and the temperature dipped into the lower 30s. That taught me to never paddle the waterway in winter again. Since then I've paddled it in May, along with a recent May 2010 solo trip in my canoe from Flamingo up the Gulf coast to Highland Beach and back via the inside route. That was 10 days and 129 miles in my 16' 2" Swift Shearwater solo canoe. I had it made of kevlar with carbon fiber rails and it weighs only 32 pounds. 

 

Gallon jugs of water are best because they can be placed wherever they fit in your canoe, plus they can be bungeed to the thwarts easily. For ten days I took 12 gallons, plus I bummed two gallons from fishermen in powerboats along the way.

 

The good thing about May is the weather is generally pleasant, predictable, warm enough to paddle in light clothes and to take a refreshing dip on occasion, plus there's hardly anyone out there and the bugs are mostly tolerable, at least in the daytime. For those who said they like paddling through The Nightmare, be advised that if you enter it on an outgoing tide you'll be left sitting in the mud until the tide comes back in. I always avoid it and paddle out the Broad River into the Gulf, hug the shoreline and then reenter at the Harney River.