Just recently I purchased two Garmin hand held GPS
walkie talkies for my kayak guides to use on the water to communicate
with the kayak bus operator and each other. They are really fun and offer the
ability to see the opposite persons coordinates and detailed travel
itinerary such as their speed and time of arrival. Another great advantage of having these units is the
ability to navigate to a specific location to find an item or
landmark often called GeoCaching.
In all of my 10 years as a kayak guide,
I have never gotten lost, nor needed a GPS to tell me where to go yet.
Saying that, we have always taken kayakers out to see shipwrecks
which were a few hundred yards off of the beach and were difficult to
locate via our past methodology of triangulation, piloting, and luck,
sometimes it would eat up too much time locating the shipwreck and
our guests would want to venture on. Thanks to the GPS, we could
find the shipwrecks once and mark the landmark as a waypoint or
coordinate on the GPS for future use.
Many of the guests we have come on our
kayak tours have children. The best part of using GeoCaching and
this technology with the kayak tours is letting the kids discover the
shipwreck, often times they find the waypoint much faster than the
adults, imagine that. The parents are proud to see their child in
the outdoors using the latest in technology to find a buried
shipwreck with a history lesson behind it. They become technological pirates.
David Rack has been a kayak guide for
10 years in places such as Maui, Door County and abroad. He is
currently ACA, CPR, and First Aid certified.
Join him on a Kayak Tour of Door County
at http://www.DoorCountyKayakTours.com
To find more kayaking locations visit
http://www.DoorCountyKayakTours.com/destinations.htm
In the winter take a snowboard or
snowkite lesson with him at http://www.Fantasysnowboarder.com
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