By Johna Till Johnson and Vladimir Brezina
Kayaking is often a solitary sport. Although paddlers sometimes go out in pairs and groups, the quintessential kayaker is a bit of a loner. Many of us make long trips alone, and prize the time we spend by ourselves.
But sometimes we inadvertently end up with fellow travelers. When Vlad and I were training for the Everglades Challenge, we found ourselves navigating the Florida Bay in pitch darkness—when all of a sudden, a fish jumped out of the water and into my lap. A few months later, one of our fellow Everglades Challengers, Clewless, topped that one when a shark jumped into his boat—during the race! There’s also the recent story of a 6-foot alligator jumping into a canoe. And of course many stories of cute, or sometimes not so cute, seals and sea lions hopping onto kayaks to hitch a ride.
The typical hitchhiker is less threatening. While weaving through the mangrove tunnel of the ironically named Broad Creek during the Everglades Challenge, a tree crab landed on the nose of my boat. Tree crabs are small—an inch or two—with shiny, mottled brown or green shells. This one was content to be my mascot for several minutes—until he started to crawl slowly towards the cockpit.
I debated knocking him off with the paddle—but that seemed unfair, and might have hurt him. So I gently nosed up to a mangrove root—and he hopped off.
He wasn’t the only crab who hitched a ride, though. Returning from a recent trip to Sandy Hook, I felt something skittering around in my cockpit. When I stripped off the spray skirt I saw a small gray sea crab, about the size of a quarter. I tried to pick him up, but he was too quick for me—and I didn’t want to risk crushing him. So we made the trip home from Sandy Hook together, with him occasionally reminding me of his presence with a tiny “nip”. (Every time he nipped I yelped, which amused Vlad.)
When I got back to Pier 40 I rinsed him out of the boat with sea water—I don’t know whether he survived in the Hudson, but I like to think he did.
But the best hitchhiker story of all is one that happened to Vlad.
I’ll let him tell it.
Vlad writes:
Once upon a time, when I was just a little kayaker, I went for a paddle with my friends Kathy and John. Like me, they were big-city paddlers, with a folding kayak in their closet. Theirs was a formidable double Klepper, whose parts came in three heavy-duty canvas bags.
We got to the river, assembled our boats, and cruised with the current for a few miles to our destination—a grassy meadow where we planned to have a picnic lunch before packing the boats up again and taking a train back to the city.
Everything worked out as planned. As usual, Kathy had brought a lovely lunch, which she laid out on the grass. And in preparation for taking the Klepper apart, John carefully laid out its three bags.
As he did so, out of the largest bag there stalked a huge brown cockroach. He stood at the mouth of the bag, surveying the meadow around, antennae twitching. Obviously, he’d been living in the bag back in John and Kathy’s closet, and we’d brought him along for the ride!
We just stood there. He descended regally from the bag and was soon lost from sight in the tall grass.
We didn’t think much about it. We had our lunch, then started disassembling the boats.
An hour or two later—we were feeling drowsy in the post-prandial sunshine—we were almost done. John had packed most of the Klepper’s parts in the bags; he was about to add the last parts and close up the bags.
And what did we then see come out of the tall grass, heading straight towards the bags? A huge brown cockroach!
This time we made a move. All three of us tried to block him, like football players. But he zig-zagged nimbly between our feet and took a leap into the open bag.
The bag was already carefully packed with parts—we couldn’t face taking them all out again.
And so the smart old cockroach rode back to the city, back to his closet, doubtless to tell his young cousins about his lovely Sunday excursion to the country…
Vladimir Brezina (RIP) 
Johna Till Johnson
Wind Against Current 
Oh funny – and disturbing! I have one, a hitchhiker I picked up, and I always feel like Colonel Kurtz banging on about he ant on the razor blade when I tell this. Near Piermont Marsh, I spotted a bee in the water – stuck but moving. I lifted him our with my paddle ad placed him on my hatch. Eventually he dried out and after ungraciously buzzing around my head, went off into the marsh to tell other bees of his adventure.
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Oh my gosh, bees!! Love your story. And I hope the other bees were suitably impressed.
Reminds me of the time Vlad got stung by a bee when we were circumnavigating Long Island.. It had been riding inside my PFD. Apparently it just really LOVED the color yellow (both our PFDs, but also his hat…).
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Great post. Smart roach.
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Indeed!
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mine is a small addition. on a recent excursion from Pelham Bay Park a small fish, no more than a silver flick, about half an inch long landed on top of my kayak right in front of the cockpit. I was able to look at him (or her) very carefully, all silver and skinny with a dark eye, flapping and contorting, and just as i was wondering what to do, some spray washed him back home.
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:-). You really have to wonder what the fish think in those circumstances..
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I love your stories. I’m trying to imagine having a shark or alligator join me in a tiny craft. Amazing.
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Yes, our friend was more than a bit perturbed! Thanks for the kind words, and for posting.
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Great story, even if I hate cockroaches
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Me too, but this little fella… I kinda like. (Now, his approximately 400,000,000,000 descendants… not so much!)
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Hilraious. Loved this post. Still recovering from that shark jumping one though. :)
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Thanks! Yes, our friend was pretty impressed. But I’m sure it just faded into one more incident in a crazy, crazy week for him!!
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Clever ol’ cockroach! Lol! Getting a shark an board would be less cute…
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I’m kind of a fan of the cockroach. And the shark was only a small one….
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The only way I like sharks is with chips ;)
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:-)
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Thanks for taking me along for the ride- I SO enjoyed it! Miss you two! Dinner soon!! ?
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Hi Phil! Well, it wasn’t YOU getting nipped in the butt by the crab every hour or so… :-) Dinner would be lovely…
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Ugh! Cockroaches. They never die, they just go away. Or in your case, return for the ride back home. What a hilarious story!
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I normally hate them, too. But this one was special (even though he presumably died years before I even met Vlad!).
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Fun stories :-) My camera bags occasionally have somewhat less exciting hitchhikers – usually moths (especially after photographing evening football matches) or spiders.
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Spiders are cool! And I expect that the dark, dry, coolness of camera bags is perfect for them.
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Heehee! I once gave a ride to a fiddler crab, from Edisto SC to NYC. She was a stowaway in the back hatch of my kayak — can’t believe she was very comfy in there, on top of the car.
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That’s how new geographical populations, and then new species, get established ;-)
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What you say about the quintessential kayaker being a bit of a loner is true of nature photographers as well. When critters start making as much of a home in my camera as some have made in your kayaks, I’ll be in real trouble.
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Surely in Texas you must find the odd scorpion or black widow spider in your bag now and again? ;-)
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I’ve never found either of those two things (even though they’re here), but your friend the cockroach has plenty of relatives in Austin.
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Aaaaaaaaahhhh!!!!! Thank heavens it wasn’t me who found the cockroach!
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Fortunately, this was in NYC—so only a cockroach. Elsewhere it might have been a scorpion or venomous spider :-)
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Schönes Wochenende wünsche ich :-)
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And the same to you! :-)
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That was one determined cockroach. You do have to wonder what was going through it’s mind. :)
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Assuming cockroaches have minds :-)
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Thats funny! You are kinder than I would have been!
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You mean to the cockroach? We had no choice! :-)
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These stories made me laugh out loud! You were much too kind to the cockroach, I would have taken everything apart again just to ensure that he stayed at the park! What a great story.
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That probably would have been wasted effort… No doubt there were many more where that one came from, and one more or less was going to make no difference :-)
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During one two week stay at the Big Sable Lighthouse I would launch into the currents around the point taking along a largish wolf spider under my seat. Denial got me through until I got home and with the pressure hose on high sent him off to parts unknown.
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That’s a bit scary! Fortunately, we haven’t taken along any big spiders, scorpions, or snakes—yet! :-)
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And that’s why they say in the case of nuclear winter, the cockroaches will inherit the earth!
I laughed and laughed — made Johna’s hitchhikers seem cuddly in comparison.
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It was pretty funny, we all had to admit at the time…
Cockroaches inheriting the earth—I have no doubt about it at all!
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Great stories. I get a lot of hitchers when biking. I do have one rule, No Biting beings allowed.
My canoe story is one of rescuing a 15 lb snapping turtle. It was injured from partially swallowing a fish hook and tangled in cattails. My friend clipped the turtle free and the two of us maneuvered him into the canoe.
He crawled back to the stern and I rested my feet on his shell to keep my toes.
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Yes, we would draw the line at biting creatures too, but haven’t had to yet… Except mosquitoes, of course—there’s just no avoiding them :-)
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More biting critters when cycling than canoeing or kayaking. Horse and Deer Flies are at the top of my No Biting List!
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In the Florida Everglades we were attacked by swarms of mosquitoes even a mile or two from shore, at night… there was just no getting away from them. But yeah, horse flies such as we have here in the NYC backwaters have an unbearably mean bite…
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