Marilyn Kircus was having her annual Choke Canyon Reservoir trip with the Houston Area Sea Kayakers (HASK) and Winnie, Kathy, and myself joined them from the Corpus Christi area.  The reservoir is about 80 miles north of Corpus and is fed by the Frio River. We drove up and camped on Friday night.  Early Saturday morning some of the group went birding and others just stayed in camp.  We left about 10:00 am for the Bracken boat launch which is about 10 miles west of the state park's Caliham Unit where we were staying.  This launch is located on what used to be the Frio River, but is now the farthest west reach of the lake (when it is full).  We paddled through lots of twists and turns, around partially submerged thickets, and past old drowned trees.  Gradually the narrow channels joined and widened into a more lake-like system.  However there was still lots of flooded timber, numerous islands and blind sloughs to explore.  We stopped for lunch just off the main channel.  We turned around in what we thought was time to get back to the launch at 4:00 pm.  However, we mistakenly took a different channel on the return trip and were a little longer on the return than planned.  However this resulted in a great closeup view of a couple of deer and a large flock of wild turkeys. 

Sunday morning we awoke to a heavy fog.  We decided to paddle out onto the main portion of the reservoir right from the camp.  The fog finally lifted and about 30 min into the paddle we had patches of bright blue sky breaking through.  It was just a short 2 hr paddle since we had to break camp and be gone by 2:00 pm but it was an enjoyable finish to the weekend.