Time on the water: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

Driven miles: 0.

My father and I drove back out to the D&R Canal with my parents' kayaks on the top of the truck. We put down in the water a little after noon in a small area just north of Weston Canal Road. We decided to paddle upstream for about 45 minutes before turning around, which turned out to be a fantastic plan.

For some reason my father is amazing at spotting turtles and other wildlife on the banks of the river (I jokingly called it his "Turtle-Vision") and kept pointing out random logs along the way with clusters of turtles sitting on them.

Since I'm photographing with a little point-and-shoot Canon I have a hard time getting shots of the parts of nature that don't naturally sit still long enough to get them because I have essentially no optical zoom. Turtles on the water are beautiful but are naturally skittish, so this started out to be a bad combination.

For the first set of turtles we saw on the right bank, I slowly paddled towards them and started snapping pictures as they took up 1/16 of the frame, then 1/8, and then by the time I got to the point where the turtle would take up a reasonable portion of the picture, they hopped into the water and disappeared.

This was only a problem for the first few sets of turtles. By the end of the trip my father was calling me "The Turtle Whisperer." At one point we saw a large painted turtle and a smaller one sitting on a log, so I aimed in the right direction and let the current slow guide my kayak over to the space right next to the log.

I was shooting pictures the entire way in and slowly but surely I got close enough that I pulled my kayak alongside the same log the turtle was sitting on and put one hand on it to stabilize myself and the turtle, while wary, still hadn't twigged to my presence.

My father had seen me move towards the log to take a few shots and had continued paddling down to get a short head start on me and let me catch up. A few minutes later he looked back and realized that I was out of view. He turned around and paddled back to the spot where I was sitting, now in macro mode snapping dozens of pictures of the turtle up close.

I was still a few feet away from the shell with my camera and after I had taken enough good shots to test my luck, I moved in a few inches at a time to get a nice macro picture of the shell when it finally had enough of me and disappeared into the water.

On the way back, we called my mom about dinner and she mentioned she was going to drive over to my grandparent's house a mile up the road and pick up a few vegetables from their garden. I convinced her to wait up and make it a bike trip together with me instead, so after a full day of upper body rowing, I got in my 2.8 miles of bicycling.

Now I am relaxing in the new enclosed porch reading Driven to Distraction, checking on what's left of a big project at work for an e-mail back to my boss, and enjoying the warm summer breezes through the window.

Evening weigh in: 133.0 lbs (on a medical scale).

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