The National Wildlife Refuge System is the world's premiere system of public lands and
waters set aside to conserve America's fish, wildlife and plants.
Cape Romain Refuge on the South Carolina coast is a fascinating expanse of barrier islands,
salt marshes, coastal waterways, sandy beaches, water impoundments, and maritime forests.
Visitors are welcome to enjoy the natural beauty of the refuge, and one of the ways
they experience it, is kayaking.
Coastal Expeditions offers kayaking tours, rentals and lessons at Cape Romain.
All right, there's one other thing we need to address.
As long as you sit up straight in your kayak and keep your head over your bottom, you're
very very stable.
The tandem boat is super stable anyway.
So we're a small group of naturalists dedicated to a mission of conservation and environmental
stewardship, and the way we try to meet that goal is by getting folks just like you, active
folks that like to get out and experience nature, out into places just like this.
Check it out, gang!
Welcome to Cape Romain National Wildlife Refuge.
This refuge is about a 68,000 acre refuge.
It is the longest stretch of contiguously protected coastline on the east coast of the
United States.
So the water that we're paddling on today is some of the most pristine water that you'll
find anywhere in the world.
If everybody will take a deep breath… currently your lungs are full of some of the cleanest
air available to a human being on the planet, not just a citizen of the United States.
This is the estuary, that's what we call this ecosystem.
The textbook definition of estuary is where saltwater and freshwater intermingle.
It is the base food link chain of the Atlantic Ocean.
Everything that lives in the ocean derives its life, in one way or another, from the
estuary.
It either gets its start here in the nursery, or it feeds on something that gets its start
here in the nursery.
Say, "Kayaking, I love it!"
"I love kayaking!"
We were lucky enough to see a pod of at least three dolphins feeding on the flats as we
were out there today.
The wildlife is one thing and interacting with the wildlife is sort of the big hit,
but just getting out there, just being out there and applying yourself in nature, doing
something physically active that causes you to reconnect with the environment.
It's sort of a push-button plastic reality that we live in, near the pavement, in our
neighborhoods and in our shopping centers.
It doesn't have to be hard to get out there to reconnect with where everything came from.