Bang, stop, bang, stop, bang, stop. That’s the sound of my kayak hitting the wind waves as we paddle from our home bay across to North Head. It is a perfect downwind run, but also a perfect bash into the wind. When we left home we thought it might be a fizzler but a hundred metres off the beach it was clear the wind was in the 15 to 20 knot range as predicted. About an hour and a quarter to arrive at North Head, and 40 minutes back! The first 500 metres I had trouble getting on the runners but then we were off.
Friday was slated to be our long paddle day but it was also my Mum’s birthday. She is 93. Which I think we can all agree is very old. My brother and his family, who are all awesome people, were heading over to the care home with a cake for morning tea and would telephone me from Mum’s phone. My Mum can’t work the telephone out anymore. When she was 70, my Mum taught herself how to scan photos and create a webpage and for a while she ran a blog! Which is pretty impressive for someone born in 1932, a decade before we even had prototype computers. Educators always want to tell us that kids must have computers in school or they’ll be left behind which is utter nonsense because smart kids have plastic minds and can work stuff out. Adults have plastic minds as long we decide we’ll keep learning throughout life.
Anyway, global boiling hasn’t hit the south coast yet and it was cold and drizzly. I needed to be able to answer the telephone easily and I did not think that would work paddling south on the ocean so we went up the Clyde River instead. We do this about once a year in a training session and if you get the tide right, it makes for a much easier long day. Once we get near to town and the bridge over the Clyde River, it’s flat water paddling all the way. We were about a kilometre from Nelligen when we turned around. Thirty six kilometres but it took over five hours so it didn’t seem particularly fast. No stops as it was too cold and wet!
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