Guerilla Bay To The Tollgates

After a couple of months of avoiding any pulling or pushing exercises at the gym, venturing out in the sea kayak only for short trips, and massive amounts of corrective exercises and mobility work my shoulders, thoracic spine, and most importantly elbows are now working properly and all pain has resolved. Of course, during the healing process I steadfastly ignored conventional medical advice to tape the offending tendon and do reductionist tendon strengthening exercises. If you have any kind of extremity injury, you really have to look upstream for the problem as it is highly unlikely that the reason you have knee, elbow, wrist, or ankle pain is truly from your knee, elbow, wrist or ankle and much more likely that it has an upstream cause.

Doug heads out to Jimmies Island

In any event, I am happily recovered and focusing on rebuilding some of the strength and muscle mass I lost over my long lay-off - which is a reminder, if ever one was needed, that injuring yourself training is ultimately stupid. Sunday we went out paddling for a real paddle day, not a really long day, but a day like we used to have before I injured myself.

Paddling through the gap at Jimmies Island

The usual summer northerly was forecast, along with a 1. 5 to 2 metre swell. Neither of us were in the mood for faffing around with transport options for a one way trip so paddling north and returning with a tail wind was a good option.

Doug heads into some rock gardens

We launched the boats from Guerilla Bay where the tide was just high enough to sneak through the rocks between the shore and the little rocky island that forms at high tide. You can always paddle inside of Jimmies Island, so we did that, and then paddled through a few small easy rock gardens along the headlands leading up to Pretty Point. Doug paddled out to one of the new shark buoys off Malua Bay, and then we headed north to Black Rock and the Tollgate Islands where the tide was very low, and the passage between the islands was intermittently closing out.

Shark Buoy off Malua Bay

It was about 11.30 am when we got to the Tollgate Islands and the north wind was blowing. Time to unfurl the sails and get blown back down south. We started out with our full metre sails but after I almost got blown over in a few gusts, we dropped down to our two-thirds sails. It was exciting sailing at times with a light boat, some gusty winds, and a surprising amount of bumpy water, but, we did keep the boats keel side down, and arrived back at Guerilla Bay about an hour after we'd left the Tollgates.

If you would rather watch the video, than read all this clap-trap, view it here.