George sound route Fiordland

I just checked on google earth and it is 28km to the start of the route when leaving from Te Anau Downs, That is around a 4 hour paddle in a sea kayak. Not much effort to save $800 and also gain the freedom on not having to keep to the boats schedule. So kayaking should be a option for any competent paddler. Seems too far and exposed for pack rafting.

>I just checked on google earth and it is 28km to the start of the route when leaving from Te Anau Downs, That is around a 4 hour paddle in a sea kayak. Not much effort to save $800 and also gain the freedom on not having to keep to the boats schedule. So kayaking should be a option for any competent paddler. Seems too far and exposed for pack rafting. You'd want to be competent and have some time up your sleeve if you were planning to sea kayak across and back. Could be really nice, could be horrendous / close to impossible to get across the main part of the lake and stay that way for a week or more if it was blowing hard. For example, I think it's been between gale and severe gale out there for a week now, continuing that way for most of the next week. If you came back to the start of such a period, you'd hope you'd left a week or two's food in your sea kayak. (I recall kayaking down the Hollyford, planning to kayak around to Milford, took an extra weeks food in case we needed to wait out some weather at Martins Bay. Ended up eating all our extra food over a week and calling in a helicopter when the weather and sea conditions were even worse at the end of the week)

its a problem with fiords, the wind gets funnels through them at high speed on milford sound most kayak trips are in the morning before the wind usually picks up like clockwork, they have one later in the day that runs one way from west to east which takes advantage of the westerly wind that picks up during the day, because you wont make any headway into the wind....

It is only about 20-40% slower paddling into a strong head wind (20knot) compared with calm conditions. So paddling into a strong headwind, would take around 6 hours to make the trip. That is assuming the paddler is fit enough to maintain momentum. It is strong side chops which really slows things down, because normally have to zig zag into them greatly increasing the distance.

the wind regularly gets above 20 knots down there, its been blowing over 100km recently