The Boys Are Back in Town: Upwind Downwind

Guess who just got back today

Them wild-eyed boys that had been away

Thin Lizzy. The Boys Are Back in Town.

It feels like a couple of years since we’ve regularly paddled with Quick Nick. Used to be, when the summer northeasterlies were blowing, a text would arrive at 8:00 pm the night before suggesting a 1:00 or 2:00 pm start the next day to paddle from our home beach across the Bay to North Head. By this time in the afternoon, the wind was at it’s acme, and the 6 or 7 kilometres to North Head would take well over an hour as our kayaks got airborne over steep wind waves which we hit within 100 metres of leaving the beach. If we were going well with a 20+ knot tailwind, we might reach our home bay in around 40 minutes or occasionally, even less on the downwind leg, although neither the outward nor the inward journey were without significant effort.

The summer northeasterlies are back, and, after Doug and Nick had an epic run on the weekend I was in Canberra, I was keen to get back out there for the summer huck-a-lung contest (which I never win). I invited Robbie and Rae, but only Robbie attended, admitting later that he wasn’t sure what a “downwinder” entailed but he is always happily up for an adventure.

I had set the departure time at noon, but both Doug and Nick suggested an earlier meeting time. In a strange way, I’ve always enjoyed the hard work of plugging across the Bay into a stiff wind. There’s something reassuring about knowing that if you keep your mind under control - and it’s always your mind not your body whichwants to stop - you can reach your destination. But I relented, and suggested we depart at 10:30 am instead. Leaving our Bay, the wind was only about 15 knots but it built as we headed northeast. Robbie had drifted far north across the Bay. I assumed he was in a futile search for shelter but no such cover from the wind exists and our strategy has always been just to paddle directly into the wind.

We considered having a quick stop on North Head Beach but didn’t (we should have). I felt warmed up from the paddle over and didn’t want to break the rhythm of paddling but a half hour delay would have allowed the wind and following sea to build a bit higher. From North Head we paddled out until we would have a direct line back to our bay. Nick gave Robbie directions on what to aim for, demonstrating that some people are just good leaders whether or not the group has a designated leader. Starting off, the three of us in plumb bow kayaks and knowing the drill which is essentially paddle as if you are being pursued by a hungry great white shark, Robbie was quickly at the back of the pack. With a bit of wobbling, the sea was pretty big and steep off North Head, Robbie got his sail up and, with paddling he moved from the back of the pack to the front of the pod.

As usual, I brought up the rear. There is simply no way I can compete with men who are bigger and stronger than me (younger too) but I’ve been a female in male dominated sports my entire life and you learn that whining is pointless and the only thing that will give you an advantage is tenacity and hard work. We were 43 minutes back to the Bay. I caught some good waves, the few seconds of rest I got as the kayak surged ahead on a good runner felt like extra oxygen on Everest. Robbie had fun and expressed an interest in coming again, and Doug and Nick, to my surprise, found the waves challenging to catch. Puffing along at the back, it always seems to me that Doug and Nick, who get rests while they wait for me, aren’t working that hard, so it’s always a slight boon to find out that they were working too. According to my Garmin watch, I spent about an hour and a half at either threshold (zone 4) or above (zone 5). I’m not sure I’ve ever accomplished that before!

Didthul and The Base

Training for mountains and big elevation gain when you don’t live near any mountains has always been a challenge. Some people resort to inclined treadmills, some to step-ups or weighted step-ups, others to hill repeats on whatever small hill is readily available, or if you live in a tall apartment block, going up and down the stairs is a reasonable but not perfect proxy. I’ve done the latter, when I lived in Calgary almost forty years ago. It was boring, a bit smelly and slightly creepy in a 1970’s horror flick kind of way. There’s nothing really scary happening but you always feel it could. Calgary, of course, has access to real mountains if you can drive an hour or more each way, but, when you are trying to find elevation in the middle of the work week, Calgary is dispiritingly flat.

Treadmills are a poor proxy. Most can only be jacked to about 15 degrees which isn’t steep at all, the belt moves under you which makes the movement easier, and mountains do not have handily smooth and even surfaces. Step ups suffer from the same problems – the height is uniform, the platform smooth and instead of stepping down forwards you step down backwards and yet no-one walks down a mountain backwards. I should say, almost no-one because on a trip to the New Denver Glacier to climb three peaks (Mount Denver, Iron and English Peaks) in 2011 a young woman with rheumatoid arthritis who had joined us walked down the trail backwards at the end of the trip because her knees were so painful.

Small hills do not replicate long hills because if you only have to gain and lose 150, 200 or even 300 metres of elevation gain at a time, the legs get a rest from either the up or the down every half to one hour. That also does not replicate long mountain days where you gain and lose 1,500 metres or more of elevation all in one go. The best we flat-landers can do is make do with what we have close by.

Last time I was training for elevation gain was 2018 before we went back to Canada for five months in 2019. I had a spreadsheet where I calculated the elevation gain against the drive time so I could identify the best local (within about an hour) hills to gain elevation. All of them were on fire trails as we don’t have any trails within an hour that have decent elevation gain. Fire trails are dull to walk up and down but so are trails once you’ve done them a time or two. But, as Mike Tysen said “discipline is doing what you hate to do, but none the less doing it like you love it.”

A bit over an hour of driving for me, is the Didthul (Pigeon House) Mountain trail which gains about 500 metres in around 5 or 6 kilometres. That’s still not that steep, and the trail, because it is so popular, is over-engineered so it’s not good training for rough surfaces but it is a trail and not a fire road and there is a good view at the top. I’ve been up Didthul four times now. Once was a long, long time ago with my Mum, once was in 2016 before the trail had been upgraded to its current highway status, and once, in 2021, we walked up from north on a very old trail which was heavily overgrown after the bushfires.

In 2016, we walked up and down Didthul in two hours – 1:15 up and 45 minutes down – on the old and perfectly good trail. This time we got to the lookout at the top in 1:25 which is not bad given a decade has passed and the trail is longer now as it is has such an easy gradient on the lower part. If you’ve been up Didthul before, you know that there is a couple of hundred metres of elevation gain and then about a kilometre of flat plateau before the final 300 metres to the top – all of which is very sturdy steps now. We did the top part twice so our elevation gain for the day was close to 800 metres. My legs were getting sore from the eccentric loading on the last set of stairs – which is the reason I search out elevation gain – but it was my feet which were most sore. I made the mistake of wearing a pair of Keen hiking boots someone had given me and the soles were thin and soft.

That is the first week of my base period done. Garmin – which gets many things wrong (my elevation gain on my surf day at Cullendulla was 762 metres!) had my kilometres at 78 (0.49) for the week over 13 hours (but that doesn’t include strength or climbing wall training).

Surf Surprises

Summer is the time for surf kayaking and down-winders, this morning I had no expectation of either, but I found myself catching a series of small but very fun waves near Square Head at Cullendulla. Last Saturday, we paddled over to the Batemans Bay bar expecting some good rides only to find that despite an outgoing tide (with a rapid current running), the bar was more like a tidal rapid than a nice series of green waves we could catch. Today, as I wandered north past Snapper Island and over to Square Head, I noticed a nice little wave coming into the mouth of Cullendulla Creek. I kept going and paddled past Hawks Nest Headland thinking I would catch a wave of two on the way back if the waves were still good.

Although the tide was rising, the waves were surprisingly good and I was catching runs that were over 300 metres long! It’s hard to predict when the main bar on the Clyde River or this little bar at the mouth of Cullendulla Creek will be good. Cullendulla normally needs a big southeasterly swell to be good – 4 or 5 metres on the Batemans Bay wave buoy and a tide that is not too high. The Batemans Bay bar is more forgiving, you can often find good waves with as little as two metres on the Batemans Bay wave buoy especially if the swell is easterly. A falling tide helps stand the waves up and makes the paddle back out easier but we have had good sessions with a rising tides as the waves sometimes stay greener for longer.

If the conditions are right, the Cullendulla bar is excellent for beginners. The waves are generally widely spaced and even. A capsize is easily managed even if the paddler cannot roll. The Batemans Bay bar can be more challenging for less competent paddlers as there are often (almost always) many lines of breaking waves. This means you can have really long rides (up to half a kilometre) by jumping from one wave to another but a capsize can also be much more challenging to manage if the paddler cannot roll. 

One of my kayaking friends who came out of her kayak on the Batemans Bay bar had a terrible time being battered in the surf before she was finally extricated. On the other hand, we’ve had a few capsizes which were easy to manage even though the paddler could not roll or missed their roll. My nephew came out on the Cullendulla bar on a day when the Batemans Bay bar was recording a four metre swell, but he is young and agile and had leapt back in his boat before either Doug or I got to him. I’ve never swum on either bar but it’s probably just a matter of time until I get dumped on the Batemans Bay bar.

Laughter is the Best Medicine

The world has, of course, been breathlessly waiting to hear from Australia’s  Hannah Ferguson of Cheek Media about the Saturday Night Live (SNL) skit featuring Shane Gillis who, if anyone had bothered to watch the entire set would know was not about women dressing as whores at the gym but was, in fact, about the travails of being fat and out of shape. Why Hannah, who is planning to contest Anthony Albenese’s Grayndler seat feels compelled to tell us why the skit was not funny – spoiler alert, lots of people laughed, many of whom were women (or whatever the “progressives” are calling women now) – is not clear to me. Surely there are more important feminist issues than a two minute monologue on an American late night TV show that ceased to be funny or even relevant a decade ago when they became obsessed with Donald Trump. For example, in the last week we have found out that an Aboriginal leader who sexually abused four children over six years had his sentence reduced because he had made “commendable efforts to keep his culture alive.” In the ACT, a 16 year old immigrant rapist got a suspended sentence (no jail time) because, apparently, he had “limited insight” into Australian norms. Another young girl was allegedly beaten to death in the one of the remote communities… and on it goes. Australia has no shortage of real feminist issues that need addressing.

The irony, of course, is that for the last two decades the progressives have been telling us that “sex work is work,” and Only Fans is a good way for women to make a little extra money on the side (“my body, my choice”). If sex work is work, why is Hannah and the hive mind female progressive movement offended by someone saying women dress like prostitutes in the gym? Is this not analogous to being offended for dressing like, for example, a nuclear scientist in the gym? Is it possible that the progressives who believe in the dignity of sex work actually, at least in a corner of their mind, recognize that for many of the women (and men) involved in sex work the work is driven by desperation not aspiration? After all, how many progressive women, such as the inimitable Jane Caro, have brought their daughters up to aspire to sex work? The number of parents who truly want their children to become sex workers is approximately zero (or perhaps one as no doubt Bonnie Blue would allegedly love for her child to follow her into the “industry”).

Hannah is a “progressive woman who loves comedy,” - this is funny in itself – but, then she goes onto explain that “good comedians find landmines in conversation, they find pressure points in society and then they hand hold their audience and guide them through the territory that is often unsafe.” This is a mistake that is easy to make, people often confuse kindergarten with comedy. Of course, I am joking. Comedy exists to make you feel uncomfortable and to relieve that discomfort with laughter. Adults, who are not so emotionally incontinent that they are making TikTok videos where they weep into the camera every five minutes because someone made a joke they don’t like, do not need “their hands held.” Save that for five year old children crossing a busy highway.

Of course, none of this is about the comedy, because if you don’t find it funny you can just switch it off. It is about the thirst for power and control that has infested the interconnected and collective hive mind virus. They move as a mass from one target to another, somehow knowing exactly when (perhaps they follow Cheek Media), it is time to remove the Ukrainian flag from your bio and install the Russian flag. Although, the latest (unfounded) accusation by the new Prime Minister of the UK, Andy Burnham, that Brexit was a Russian plot, is going to be difficult to reconcile.

If you have a sense of humor and want a laugh to relieve your despair at the state of a justice system that sends violent male offenders back into society to offend again while prominent feminists take up the airwaves talking about comedy, I suggest you scan some of the X rebuttals to the skit. They are truly hilarious.

Weeks Five and Six: Transition into Training

The plan for week five was to hold training constant at a 10% increase from the previous week. Instead, I did 13 hours on my feet – oopsie. I was in the ACT for a few days and had the opportunity to do some walks I had not previously done before. Because I was in the ACT for five days, I only got in two strength session so I deloaded on strength and uploaded on endurance. Not a bad plan really.

Week six was my official deload week but I plugged in four strength sessions because of the two missed sessions the previous week. On foot volume was drastically reduced (the basic idea is to cut 50%) to just over three hours. The week finished strong so next week I move out of the transition phase into base training and begin a steady increase in volume and elevation gain.

Mount Sedgwick and Artificial Intelligence

The Guardian is breathlessly (can the written word be breathless?) reporting a story about a 16 year old lad that found himself stuck on a cliff on Crown Mountain in Vancouver’s North Shore Mountains. The young lad (Bryce), who was well equipped with extra food, clothing and a headlamp (a surprisingly well equipped 16 year old in other words) had used AI (specifically Claude) to plot a route from the top of the Grouse Mountain gondola to the summit of Crown Mountain. According to news reports, Bryce managed to veer off the standard scramble route climbed by hundreds of people every year (the North Shore Mountains are very accessible from the nearby and heavily populated metropolitan area of Vancouver, population around three million) onto the multi-pitch rock climbing route known as Widowmaker Arete. Widowmaker Arete ascends the northeast buttress while the standard scramble route ascends the south ridge of Crown Mountain.

Henrietta Lake and cabin

The big reason this story has made headlines in the Southern Hemisphere is, of course, the fact that the young lad used AI for his route description. Our overlords, whose penchant for panic is only exceeded by their desire for control, have also jo that there is a “greater than 10% chance the technology [AI] could kill all humans in the next decade.” If this has a bit of a Job (not job, Job, pronounced with an e) feel about it that could be because within the last half decade we have had the COVID panic, the monkeypox panic, the first iteration of the bird flu panic (when eggs became scarce because the authorities killed all the chickens), the AI panic, and now we are back again with another bird flu panic. In betwixt all this, we have had the minor Russia pneumonia panic and the possibility of Ebola spreading (the latter would actually be disastrous). If at first you don’t succeed try, try, and try again appears to be the mantra of our increasingly malleable media.

Making dinner in the rain

But people getting off-route and into trouble is nothing new. In 2005, Doug and I took the ferry across Howe Sound to the Woodfibre plant. This was a paper and pulp mill that shut down in 2006 but was still running on a skeleton staff in 2005. We had gone to climb Mount Sedgwick. This took us two days. Our first day involved a six kilometre logging road walk, followed by a steep, rocky, rooty, narrow and somewhat precarious foot pad to deep snow (it was June) which we post-holed through until we finally found a bit of snow free ground for camp after 1500 metres of elevation gain with still a goodly distance remaining to the top of Mount Sedgwick. It rained all night but we did continue to the summit of Sedgwick the next morning (in wet conditions and thick fog) and walked back out to the ferry in the afternoon.

Kumo was never amused by wet weather 

despite being a labrador

The most interesting and surprising encounter I have ever had with anyone in the backcountry happened on this trip. We first met this chap – who I dubbed “Survivor Man” - on our way up to our campsite. He was hunkered down in an old watchman’s hut at Henrietta Lake (dammed in the 1940’s to provide fresh water for Woodfibre). We managed to escape a long conversation with him on our first day out as we were keen to press on to camp with rain threatening and a long way to go to camp.

Doug and Kumo on the summit of Mount Sedgwick

However, on our way back out, about a kilometre from the ferry terminus we caught up with Survivor Man who was also walking out to catch the ferry. Survivor Man was carrying a hard shell Samsonite case and had only one functional shoe. On his shoeless foot he had wrapped a strap around his ankle to hold a small duffle bag in place as a quasi-functional “shoe.” This was topped with a plastic bag. Although we whizzed past him with a quick hello – it’s not hard to walk faster than someone with only one shoe carrying a large Samsonite case – we did spend 45 minutes conversing with him at the ferry terminus as we had all missed the previous ferry by 15 minutes.

Henrietta Lake

I present, for your edification, the highlights of our conversation in point form:

• He was recently back in Canada after teaching English in China;

• He had been out for ten days with the intention of crossing the spine of the range – a mix of heavily forested and remote mountainous terrain – to eventually arrive at the small coastal community of Sechelt. This is a very long and trackless distance which has likely never been done. Even pre-colonisation, the First Nations people would not bash up and over the spine of the range.

• The only navigational aid he had for this endeavour was a “Backroads” map book. These map books had no contours or other information and were essentially just a street directory of logging roads. I should add that he didn’t actually have the Backroads book, he had a black and white photocopy of ONE page of the book!

• He had no tent, sleeping bag or sleeping pad, but he did carry a tarp. Bear in mind that above about 1300 metres, there was continuous and deep snow.

• His shoe had been irrevocably burnt whilst sleeping next to a fire when he knocked his shoe into the fire in his sleep.

• He was also without socks as he had used his cooking pot over an open flame to dry them and had accidentally melted them.

• He had been out 10 days and had one day of good weather.

The point of this long story is that poor judgement was a feature of human behaviour before AI. Access to AI won’t change that. In fact, had Survivor Man had access to AI he might have made better decisions.

Around the Orroral Valley

Without any clear goal in mind, I’d left the van at the Orroral Campground and walked northwest along the wide and grassy river valley on a good trail. After a couple of kilometres, a solid metal bridge crosses the Orroral River and a grassy trail continues northwest to the old Orroral Homestead. Instead of crossing the bridge, I wandered up the grassy valley until I was under the large granite tors at point 1201 on the topographic map, known as Orroral Tors.

Having looked up at the these tors many times before on trips out of the Orroral Valley I foolishly began to walk up. The initial 50 to 70 metres of elevation gain was reasonable with easy enough bush to get through. Gradually, then suddenly (mostly suddenly, in fact) the bush got outrageously thick with an extremely prickly and thickly growing shrub (could be gorse bitter pea). I was not dressed for bush-bashing in shorts and a tee-shirt and was soon sporting full body scratches as well as having several plant spines embedded in my flesh. It was about this point that I also realised I had forgotten to text Doug before I left Canberra and, if he didn’t hear from me for three days, he would be worried.

I keyed up an I’m OK text to send but had no service. Much to my chagrin, I realised I would have to drive back out of the Orroral Valley to find service. This made my decision to turn around easy, although I can’t say it was hard. Strangely enough as I walked back down the valley, my phone pinged that I had got a text from Doug. A bit of walking about randomly turning the phone around while holding it in the air and I even managed to get Doug on the phone.

Back at the bridge, I crossed over to the west side and walked north towards the old Orroral Homestead. A half kilometre before the old homestead there is a side trip up a little hill which has a nice view over the valley. After wandering around the old homestead site I walked back to the van for the night.

Next day I drove up the valley to the old space station site and walked up the Granite Tors track. This is a very good and popular track that follows the route of an old road but is gently switch-backed with steps. At the top, there is a short loop and you can enter the bottom floor of the old space observatory and admire the view from a lookout. Back down in the valley, I had lunch and tea before riding my mountain bike northwest up the Orroral Valley. The Orroral Valley is home to thousands of kangaroos which hopped away in waves as I rode past.

On my final day, I drove up to Honeysuckle Campground and continued part way up the dirt road to ridge top. I’ve walked up and down this road before and it’s hard pack, dusty and unpleasant to walk. But, it’s also steep so I only drove part way and ended up walking the steepest section. At ridge top, there is a tourist hike around Legoland (lots of boulders and caves made of stacked boulders) which you can extend along climbers tracks as there are rock climbs up here. Back at the campground, I detoured up to the old space station for lunch where I had a walk around and pondered man landing on the moon all those years ago.

Among the interpretive signage at the site is this “Message from Australia,” written by Australia’s 19^th (short-lived) Prime Minister on the occasion of the lunar landing. It’s hard not to read this message and wonder at the abject deterioration in Australian ambition. How did we go from avowing as a nation to value exploring, going further, having courage and, most importantly believing that the “chance of dangerous adventure [should be] available to all” to nation of rule makers and followers, gleefully shutting down any chance to experience even a modicum of risk?