Kayak at Sungai Jelutong

Sungai Jelutong is a river on Pulau Ubin, with its mouth near Ketam Island. We kayaked over there on November 20th, 2021.

It was a cloudy day with sporadic light rain, great for kayaking but not really photogenic.

We launched from Pasir Ris Park and Beach, and paddled across 2 kilometer wide Johor strait to reach the river. The water was calm at this stretch of the strait, it felt like kayaking on a lake!

Launching from Pasir Ris Beach

The Sungai Jelutong is left to the Green Buoy 

We reached the shoreline of Pulau Ubin in about 30 minutes. The shoreline is mostly densely forested, and beautiful. We saw a group of kayaks paddling toward Sungai Jelutong, we later followed them into a branch we did not know was there!

The river is clean and calm as well, we did not even feel it was flowing, likely due to the high tide. Paddling upstream, we saw birds flying overhead, and heard them chirping in the trees - you can hear the chirping from the video below. We did see a sandpiper hopping from snag to snag just in front of our kayak for a while.

A rocky patch near the mouth of Sungai Jelutong

The river mouth looking from upstream

A kayak trip organized by commercial outfitter

A common sandpiper

Except the one group of kayaks, we had the river just for us most of the time until around noon time. It was us immersed in nature! The river was scenic with various mangroves lined on both banks of the river most of the time. I could not name them, but could tell they were different because of different flowers or fruits they bore.

We paddled to (almost) every branch of the river, and some were not even on the map - they were there because of high tide. When we paddled out of the river around 1pm, we could see the river was flowing outward! Tide was receding. (Note: November 20th, high tide was 2.9 m at ~ 11am, low tide was 0.4 m at ~ 5:45 pm.).

On the way back to Pasir Ris beach, we went to Ketam Island which was by the mouth of Sungai Jelutong. On this side of the island, it is densely wooded, another paradise for birds, which were heard but not seen. We did manage to capture a kingfisher on camera.

A small beach on Ketam Island

Big trees on Ketam Island

A kingfisher

As we were about to cross Johor Strait, three ships were heading our way from northwest, and later one giant freight ship from east. We waited until they all past the area before crossing … in fact we paddled in parallel to the ship pathway as seen in the kayak trail map between mile marker 8 and 9. We were back to Pasir Ris after 1:30pm. We paddled over 10km in 3 and half hours.

This ship was the first of three ships crossing 

Adjust our kayak orientation for a good picture and be ready to cross the strait

Note - despite the cloudy sky, the UV index was still high. One has to have protection from UV. We wore sun sleeves and leggings to protect ourselves.

Sun Sleeves and leggings for prevention of "Sun burn" - the high UV