Saturday the 18th March and I was determined not to get caught in the afternoon winds like the day before, so I woke up at 5:20, packed up the tent and slipped out of the cove before sunrise.
Unfortunately, all to no avail. The Westerly was up before I was, and in a carbon copy of the day before, I got caught in a squall within minutes of leaving the shelter of the cove. This time there was no swell, but the pre-sunrise wind was icy, and having blown up so suddenly the chop was steep and closely gathered. The kayak could rise over the first wave, but then plunged through the next, bringing it to a near complete halt as water hit me square in the chest. Battling the chop and the 25-30knot headwind was like paddling through concrete. After an hour of that nonsense I was absolutely stuffed, arms like lead, cold, and it was only 7am with 24k to go to landfall.
Anyway, the wind did drop to 15-20knots under a sky of patchy cloud. In one way it was really amazing becuase as the sky cleared the wind dropped, but a soon as another cloud bank came over, it picked up again. Every cloud was different too, and lower clouds whipped up more icy wind than the benign high clouds. I think thats a bit like life. We all view the same ocean, but we each exert our own influence on it too. Think about it.
While thinking up analogies between clouds and life I was paddling my guts out into the uncompromising headwind, and arrived at Spring Beach about 14 hours later, more exhasuted than i've been all trip.
And speaking of rapidly changing weather, i've just heard that while I was paddling Gunns withdrew their IIS from the RPDC (the Independent commission assessing the proposal) . You'd think that was a good thing BUT The next day Premier Paul Lennon announced that he was going to recall parliament early to bring in a special pece of legislation which would allow Gunns to circumvent the RPDC process. Hey, who needs an independent commission anyway
I'll write more about that tomorrow, but in the meantime check out
See http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21387677-2702,00.html for the details
If you need a laugh after reading that check out this video on youtube - its not big on analysis but tells the story more than effectively