It's Been A While.....

Since we went out looking for the Batemans Bay wave rider buoy, over a year if specific dates are required. For the first time in 40 years, I spent more than $15 on a watch and got a Garmin watch for my 60^th birthday. Not top of the line Garmin watch. I do not need to watch videos, play music, or even pay for coffee with my watch, but I did want to be able to track speed, distance, time while paddling (and doing other activities), plus, many of the other features, altimeter, barometer, compass would also come in handy.

So, I plugged the last waypoint we had for the wave rider bouy into my watch and we started out from Sunshine Bay using the “navigate” function, which is basically a “go to” straight line to the destination. On a previous walk, I had experimented with the course function, which works pretty well and could be very handy when bushwacking to a destination. Our last known location of the wave bouy however, was pretty much straight east from Sunshine Bay with no intervening obstacles so a simple straight line distance would work.

I was interested to see how straight our course would be as, apart from a small arrow on my watch, we had nothing much to use as a visual. Theoretically, I could line up a couple of transits and stay on those but even those transits would be lost after a certain distance. After a bit over 1.5 hours, we arrived at the last known location of the wave bouy. Nothing. These happens more often than not. We scanned the horizon to east, north and south (no point looking back the way we had come) and, way off to the south, when both us and the bouy were up on a wave, Doug spied a very small whitish looking object. It might be the bouy, although it might not.

The malaise I had while paddling east evaporated and we paddled strongly south for just over a kilometre, the white thing on the horizon gradually resolving itself into the wave buoy. There was a ripping northerly current at the bouy which means the East Australian Current is close inshore as we were only about four kilometres off-shore. We returned via the Tollgate Islands both of us throwing in some sprints on the way back. According to my watch, I managed, briefly, to touch over 9 km/hour.