I will preface this story by saying that our explorations are very detailed, safer, and much more specific moving forward.
This was our first adventure where we "blindly traveled" down the river in our new kayaks. As avid explorers that love to travel and experience real adventure, we try to explore new areas that are less traveled and that we think would contain beautiful scenery and abundant wildlife. We decided on this trip to explore South East Indiana, near the Whitewater Memorial State Park.
For us, "Blindly traveling" for us looks like the following. We decide on an area of Indiana that we think we would like to explore. From there, we open Google Maps and look for a body of water that looks big enough to be a quality trip. We then identify "Potential" start and stop points of our journey by guess-timating how far we think we would like to travel. We then pack accordingly and head that direction. The first place we drive to is the finishing location of our trip. We leave the empty vehicle at this location. On this trip, we parked at the Brookville Reservoir Marina where we knew we would be able to exit the river without issue. After we leave the empty vehicle we head to the launch location and try to find a location that we feel confident that we can leave our vehicle without being vandalized or towed. The "Hope & Pray" method. This method has since been replaced with the public access method where locations are specifically identified to be legal and able to launch and exit the waterways. We can now use official data to determine how quickly we will travel down the river, where we will enter and exiting the river and how much distance we will cover during the trip.
