Palindromic craft

Usage examples of kayak.

The ice just slid down off it, and it was there, a thing, a new color just invented, but one that had also been waiting in the ice for a long time, a real long time, just for two juys in a kayak to see it.

And my own solo odyssey, I thought: the kayak farcasting from Old Earth to Lusus and the cloud planet and all the other places.

Low in the water, veiled by flying white-caps, they came--Boreland and Harlan bailing desperately, and in the stern Kayak Bill, his hand still on the tiller, keeping the oarless boat steady a-top the swift, rushing wave that was sweeping them on to the beach!

So that night I added till it became a great pile, and I hauled up my oomiak, which was of the value of twenty kayaks.

A stubby tug drew a freight-laden barge, two trawlers spread their nets, and in several kayaks, each accompanied by an osel, herders kept a pod of river pigs moving along.

All those stately kayaks, umiaks, York boats and peterheads were displaced by functional 14- or 24foot square-stern aluminum canoes, weighted down with 25- or 45-h.

Wood can be used for sleds, and tent frames and the frames of kayaks and umiaks, the large, broad vessels which can hold several individuals, sometimes used in whaling.

Many times the umiaks, or the light, one-man vessels, the kayaks, do not return.

Now the kayak hung under a delta-shaped parasail, supported by a dozen nylon risers that rose from strategic positions along the upper hull.

The hull of my kayak lost its glint and the parasail above me quit catching the light as this vertical terminator moved past and above me.

The kayak and its parasail bucked and rocked in sudden downdrafts and elevator-quick lifts of thermals.

I was sure that the risers were going to collapse, the kayak and I were going to fall into the parasail shroud, and we would fall for minutes -- hours -- until pressure and heat ended my screaming.

Once, just after the halo that was the sun above had passed the zenith, the kayak was blown into a particularly rough patch of climbing cloud, and the parasail almost folded in the violent updraft.

Perhaps it is odd to admit, but my mind wandered all that afternoon, even while the alien cuttlefish swam alongside within swallowing range and alien platelet creatures danced and hovered within meters of the kayak and parasail.

True, the shock and surprise of the thing had momentarily swept him off his feet, but why had he, in foolish reckless resentment against unjust circumstances, rushed off instead to the cabin of Kayak Bill and taken glass after glass of the stuff that had put him in such a state of oblivion that he was unable to take any part in the Potlatch festivities?