I missed a Sunday paddle. There were plans, and there was weather, the weather changed and the plans changed and I ended up running the Bingie Dreaming Track instead. It is a long time since I have run the trail and you forget how pretty it is, marred only by one section of "public road" where people must drive, no matter the conditions, because walking 200 to 400 metres would be just too difficult. Often there are piles of garbage, fire pits and even human excrement here, but this time there was just a terrible mud bog which did not stop people driving even then.
But the following Sunday rolled around and it looked like we might get some interesting paddling conditions, a large northerly swell with a long period, a southerly change with moderate winds and a building southerly change. Turns out it was, as so often it is, a bit of a fizzler.
Doug and I left from our home beach at 7 am to paddle south to meet the rest of the group at Guerilla Bay at 9 am. I was nursing some minor dread of what was to come. My paddle plan had us going as far south as Broulee Island which would have put our paddle day at over 40 kilometres. It has to be done if you are training for 40 kilometre days, and I have done them before, but there is the doing and thinking. The thinking is often worse than the doing. Though in the modern era of social media bragging many people operate under the assumption that there is thinking and talking. Doing never actually enters the equation.
Happily, we cruised into Guerilla Bay at 8.30 am having covered 12 kilometres in 1.5 hours, which is still about half the speed of Nick, but probably twice my early speed when I piloted the massive green slime (a plastic boat that was way too big for me) around the coastline.
The portend of interesting paddling conditions meant we had a small group, just Nick and Adrian, so we offered the lads a one way paddle as we could easily shuffle both them and their boats back to the cars at the end of the day.
However, it was way too early to paddle north so we headed south around Burrewarra Point and into the Tomago River at Mossy Point. I got out to stretch again. As I get older I notice more and more the effects of being jammed into one tight position. I have always hated sitting in the car for long periods, a long period for me being about 10 minutes. Conversely, I held this weird viewpoint that I should be able to paddle 40 kilometres straight without getting out of the kayak and anything less was a sign of terrible weakness of character. But, as you get older performance must necessarily take a back seat to persistence and you begin to view the most important goal of training as the ability to continue training.
In the river, I got a bit more forward stroke coaching from Nick, although at hour three and 20 kilometres of paddling, my ability to concentrate was severely lagging. There was a bit of a breeze on the beach and we had hopes the wind was increasing so we paddled back out the bar and headed east for Burrewarra Point and the northerly run. We dallied at Burrewarrra Point for a while where there was a huge school of fish and then continued north. The wind never seemed to get above 10 knots and the sea was calmer than when Doug and I had paddled south so the interesting conditions were actually pretty bland.
Under the Antipodean summer sun, with barely any wind and high humidity, sitting in the kayak was getting increasingly uncomfortable so we paddled into Garden Bay for a lunch stop. We don't often land in this bay as it is close to all our usual launching points, but it is really pretty, protected by reefs at the mouth and has a nice small sand beach and grass to stretch on. Not being on the main road along the coast it is generally not very busy. So some more stretching and then the final run back to our home bay. My rough estimate of our total distance was 37 to 38 kilometres so not a bad training day.
Pictures from previous trips as my camera battery was dead.
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