Today was the first day that it actually felt like winter paddling. It was supposed to rain a bit which isn’t conducive to rock climbing but is appropriate for paddling. In the end, it didn’t rain at all, though I was pretty well wet through by the end of my requisite 20 kilometres as, because I had got tired of fighting with my dry spray deck, I had reverted, on the coldest day of the year so far, to my worn out and leaky Electric Water spray deck. Electric Water custom makes their spray decks to fit both your waist and your cockpit whereas of the shelf spray decks can be a bit of a bitch to get on.
As I was passing Circuit Beach on my way to Lilli Pilli Bay, I noticed the Joonga shark boat speeding towards one of the drum lines. It’s always interesting to see what they have pulled aboard – no sharks are injured, they are photographed, measured, tagged and released – this time it was a bronze whaler that the men on the boat thought was about 2.5 metres long. It had a very thick square head and it took a bit more wrangling than I’ve seen the lads engaged in before.
The ocean has been hopping with activity this winter. The water is clear a lot of the time as we have had a long periods of calm winds with few or no big storms coming through. In our home bay, I’ve paddled out multiple times into massive schools of fish. So many fish that as they swim near the surface they create a wave. The dolphins are always there, sometimes just swimming, other times feeding, and a few seals have moved in as well. The only shark I’ve seen, however, is the bronze whaler today although the buoys are reporting great whites and other big sharks around.
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