Kayak Camping the Outer Banks

Recently my son Jed emailed me with an invitation. Could I break away and meet him in the southern Outer Banks of North Carolina for a couple days of kayaking and camping?

When your grown son, who is in the Army and lives 800 miles away, extends an invitation like that, you do whatever it takes to make it happen. I loaded the kayaks on the car, he got in his truck, and we met in Havelock, NC.

The next day we put into the water at the Cape Lookout National Seashore visitor center, he in the 15-foot sea kayak, I in my very impressive 8-foot flat-water yacht, which I have named “The Brain of Pooh,” after Pooh Bear’s honey jar boat. We had our camping gear, 5 gallons of Gatorade, and 3 gallons of water. Camping at CLNS is primitive, with no water or other facilities most places.

The weather was beautiful, the water warm, the breeze brisk. It was glorious – at high tide. Unfortunately, most of the times when we needed to land or depart it was low tide. That meant dragging the kayaks across grass and mud and shallows, sinking sometimes to our knees. When we could float, the breeze was often so stiff that we had a hard time keeping our course. (My kayak has no rudder, and Jed’s legs are so long he couldn’t use the pedals on his.) At one point we found ourselves towing the boats through sharp-edged cord grass up to our knees, then carrying our camping gear several hundred yards across Core Bank through marsh grasses up to our eyes. We felt like Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn in “African Queen.”

The real excitement, though, happened the first night. We had set up camp on the sound side of Shackleford Bank. After a yummy meal of canned chili, canned potatoes, and canned peas all mixed together (kayak camping is different from backpacking in that the emphasis is on bulk, not weight), we watched the fire die, the sun go down, the wild horses wander and the beach come alive with thousands of fiddler crabs. Then I started toward where I had laid out my sleeping bag. As I walked toward it, my headlamp trained just ahead of my foot, the beam of light suddenly illuminated a textbook example of a copperhead snake – one of the most poisonous snakes in North America.

Jed verified that was what it was, and while he kept the beam of light on the snake (which wasn’t at all worried by our presence), I carefully removed my sleeping gear. We retreated to the other side of the point and slept on the sand just above the high tide line. Perhaps surprisingly, I had no trouble at all falling asleep.

What are the odds that I would choose to go up to bed just as the snake chose to come to that same place? What are the odds that it would be just where my headlamp shone, at just the time that I shone it? What are the odds that I would have, a few days earlier, decided to buy a headlamp to take with me, rather than the tiny squeeze light I usually used? What are the odds that I would have bothered to use the lamp instead of my normal practice of moving around camp by moonlight? Had any of those things not happened just so, I could easily have stepped on that poisonous snake, or gone to bed only to find it already nestled in my sleeping bag. And we were a two hour night-time paddle from help.

Statistically, the way you calculate a combination of odds is that you multiply the individual odds together. Multiplying the odds against all those things happening just as they did, the result is either an astronomical coincidence, or answered prayer. I firmly believe it was the latter, because I had bathed the whole trip in prayers, for guidance, good weather, fun, and especially protection. Maybe that's why I was able to go to sleep so easily.

I actually used that experience as a sermon illustration this past Sunday, in a sermon I had already planned to preach, called “Deliver Us from Evil.” (You can download an audio podcast of it from trinityannapolis.org.) We don’t often hear about how to pray prayers of protection, but it is a very practical thing to know and do.

I’d rather not go through something like that every time I need a sermon illustration. But God is good, and God answers prayers. And kayaking the Outer Banks is a lot of fun!