The difficulty of training for a kayak trip that has mandatory long crossings between landing spots is that you start to focus almost exclusively on kilometres paddled during training days. Each training day, you try to go further than the last, hopefully faster than the last. Training, of course, does not work like that, particularly training on the ocean where currents, wind and swell make all the difference in how fast you can cover kilometres. All of that does not even factor in that some days you are just a bit more tired than others. Watching the kilometres tick over on a tracking device can be a soul sapping experience.
A couple of days ago, we did 37 kilometres, a few shy of our previous longest day, but we had no wind, and it was hot and muggy at sea. To make a change and practice managing my incipient sea sickness, we paddled out to sea looking for the Batemans Bay wave buoy. We had very little confidence in finding the buoy. The last published location is from a decade ago and the buoy moves around in storms.
As expected, there was no sign of the buoy, so we paddled west towards the coast, circled Wasp Island, took a second run around the Tollgate Islands, and as fatigue and cramp from sitting in a small boat for so long descended paddled back to shore.
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