The hardest thing about the Hard Things project is keeping up with the blog about all the Hard Things. Saturday, I had various Hard Thing ideas rattling around in my head but opted for an early morning along the Bingie Track at Congo. This meant getting up at about 5 am as I had to be back at Congo at a reasonable hour for a meeting. My plan had been to get 16 kilometres in before about 9 am but I only made about 12 km.
National Parks has done a huge amount of work on the Bingie Track and it is in really good shape now. The section from Mullimburra Point to Grey Rocks is now very fast on a rebuilt track. I could be wrong but it seemed as if this section of track had been rerouted as previously I have always gone along all the little beaches between Grey Rocks and Mullimburra Point but I may have been off the track along that section.
Sunday’s hard thing was 38 kilometres kayaking down the coast. Another really early morning as we had arranged to meet friends at Guerilla Bay and were not sure how long it would take us to paddle down. In the end, we were made good time and arrived after about 1.5 hours of paddling. It was a fantastic morning, calm, a slow rolling southerly swell, and really clear water. We paddled over schools of fish all the way down the coast.
Conditions were suitable for some rock gardening so we paddled through some gauntlets around Jimmies Island and Burrewarra Point before heading over to Broulee Island for lunch. While we were onshore, a 10 to 13 knot easterly came up which really ruffled conditions at Burrewarra Point. Burrewarra Point protrudes about 1.5 kilometres out into the coastal current flow and often has interesting conditions. It was lively coming back around after lunch.
Our friends paddled back into Guerilla Bay while Doug and I headed north up the coast. It felt like a real slog heading north, easterly winds tend to make for lumpy, bumpy, sloppy – whatever you want to call it – conditions along that section of coast and the paddling felt slow and hard. By the time we were paddling the last five kilometres home I had convinced myself that we must be paddling into a northerly current. That would explain our easy paddle south and our harder paddle north. Turns out, perception is everything, as Doug had the GPS running and our paddle speed on both the north and south legs was very similar so my interpretation of current was actually just effort.
I was tired when we got home and alseep by 8.30 pm. Here’s an end mark, sometimes called a glyph, to indicate the terminus of this blog post■ Who says I can’t learn new stuff? And yes, I deliberately blew past the gliph.
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