This is the public boat ramp at Rollingview State Park at Falls Lake State Recreation Area (address: 4201 Baptist Rd, Durham, NC 27703). It has a large parking lot, a swimming beach (currently closed due to Covid19), and three boat launch ramps with a single dock. There is a small sandy area adjacent to the ramps for prepping your kayaks/canoes. This should not be confused with the private Rollingview Marina that is nearby within the same state recreation area. The whole peninsular that the launch area sits on is very popular and can get quite crowded. On a recent weekend paddle there, we left the launch with almost no one around at about 10am and returned to a crowd of boats and PWCs at about 3pm (we opted to carry our kayaks over the closed beach area instead, which turned out to be a great idea as we could just lay all the equipment on grass instead of sand and rocks).
You have a number of choices of routes once you are in the water. Falls Lake is huge (250 miles or so of shoreline) and hugging the coast in either direction has some lovely scenery and also keeps you away from most of the PWCs. We like heading west around the peninsular because there are more inlets to explore and several "beachy" pullouts. The lake can get windy later in the afternoon and the prevailing winds tend to blow eastward so you might have a favorable wind to blow you back to the launch site in the afternoon. Keep an eye on late afternoon storms in summer.
Wildlife are plentiful and even on this busier side of the lake there are some osprey, heron, egrets, and bald eagles. For more abundant wildlife, you could try the north and west sides of the lake.
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