Yesterday, I paddled from my home bay to Kioloa with a great group of female paddlers. Conditions were mixed. We started with light (under 10 knot) tail winds and cloudy skies, paddled a short middle section (after a quick beach break) under calm conditions and light rain, and finished the last 8 to 9 kilometres with increasingly brisk winds (up to about 17 knots), rapidly building seas and full-on rain. As we paddled around the final headland into sheltered water, I admit to a great deal of relief. Our group may have begun the process of “having an epic” had conditions deteriorated any further.
The local automated weather collection sites (Moruya airport and Ulladulla lighthouse) recorded winds for the appropriate period (9:00 am to 1:30 pm) as SW to S, around 13 knots with gusts to 20 knots. The Bureau of Meterology (BOM) reports from automated stations (both Moruya airport and Ulladulla are automated) provide average wind speed in knots over 10 minutes and maximum wind gust, also in knots, recorded over 3 seconds. By 2:30 pm, thankfully we were off the water, the Ulladulla station was reporting wind speeds around 20 knots with gusts closer to 30 knots. The Moruya station, meanwhile, recorded consistently lower winds than Ulladulla . Although wind speed is a ratio level measure; for the sea kayaker, the difference between 5 and 10 knots of wind is radically different to the difference between 15 and 20 knots of wind, or 20 and 25 knots of wind.
Of course, afterwards, there was some discussion of wind speeds with some women thinking we had 20 to 25 knots of wind, and some others – notably me – thinking we had closer to about 17 knots maximum. You would think this would be an easy conundrum to solve but an accurate wind speed, in the absence of a hand held anenometer is actually not completely simple. Both nearby automated stations indicated we paddled with about 13 knots of wind but the vigorous seas and widespread “whitehorses” indicate that wind speeds were higher than that but not above 20 knots. At 25 knots, I have had my kayak blown sideways across the water with me in it and have felt like I might lose my paddle. Those are good benchmarks of strong winds for me.
The question, of course, is does precision and accuracy matter in this instance (remember one can be precise without being accurate)? Like most things in life, I think “it depends.” If you want to know that you can paddle safely in 20 to 25 knots of wind, accuracy matters. However, if your goal is personal challenge then both accuracy and precision are irrelevant. Most of us recognise the “adventure zone” of appropriate challenge, where it does not really matter if the wind was 10 knots or 50 knots. Challenge is individual. If conditions were difficult for you and you perservered, good on you, you’ve just started your own Hard Things project.
Mostly, I don’t see a problem in being wrong, unless you both over-estimated conditions and are using those overstated conditions to inform future paddling decisions. That could end in a Really Hard Things project and might be the kind of fun that isn’t really fun.
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